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. 

References

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Bacchi, C. and Bonham, J. 2014. Reclaiming discursive practices as an analytic focus: Political implications. Foucault Studies, 17, 173–192.

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

Bacchi, C. & Rönnblom, M. 2014. Feminist Discursive Institutionalism—A Poststructural Alternative, NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, DOI: 10.1080/08038740.2013.864701 

Barad, K 2012, “Interview”, in R Dolphijn and I Van der Tuin, New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies, Open Humanities Press, Ann Arbor, pp. 48-70, ISBN: 10 1-60785-281-0.

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

Chaufan, C.; Hemsing, N.; Heredia, C.; McDonald, J. Trust Us—We Are the (COVID-19 Misinformation) Experts: A Critical Scoping Review of Expert Meanings of “Misinformation” in the Covid Era. COVID 2024, 4, 1413–1439. https://doi.org/10.3390/ covid4090101 

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

Deleuze, G. 1988/ Foucault. Translated and edited by S. Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). 

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, translated by A. Sheridan Smith, New York: Pantheon Books.

Foucault, M. 1977. Nietzsche, genealogy, history. In D.F. Bouchard, (Ed.), Language, counter-memory, practice: Selected essays and interviews Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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Fraser, S. 2020. Doing ontopolitically-oriented research: Synthesising concepts from the ontological turn for alcohol and other drug research and other social sciences. International Journal of Drug Policy, 82, Article 102610. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2019.102610

Howarth, D., Standring, A. and Huntly, S. 2020. Contingent, contested and constructed: a poststructuralist response to Sevens’ ontological politics of drug policy. International Journal of Drug Policy. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2020.102965 

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

Lancaster, K., Rhodes, T. and Rosengarten, M. 2020. Making evidence and policy in public health emergencies: lessons from COVID-19 for adaptive evidence-making and intervention. Evidence & Policy, 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1332/174426420X15913559981103

Latour, B. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 

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

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Lemke, T. 2018. An Alternative Model of Politics? Prospects and Problems of Jane Bennett’s Vital Materialism. Theory, Culture & Society, 35(6): 31-54.

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

MacLure, M. 1994. Review Essay: Language and Discourse: the embrace of uncertainty. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 15(2): 283-300.

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. 

Munk, A. & Abrahamsson, S. 2012. Empiricist interventions: Strategy and tactics on the ontopolitical battlefield. Science Studies, 25(1): 52-70. 

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

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

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Stengers, I. 2018. Another science is possible: A manifesto for slow science. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. 

Van Wyk, A. R. 2012. What Matters Now? Review of Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, Duke University Press, 2010. Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, 8(2): 130-135. Whatmore, S. J. 2009. Mapping knowledge controversies: science, democracy and the redistribution of expertise. Progress in Human Geography, 33(5): 587-598.

The term “poststructuralist” appears often in the Research Hub entries. I thought it was time to indicate how I have come to self-identify as “poststructuralist”. To this end I am reproducing a talk I gave in 2006 entitled “Postmodern by default” (not published elsewhere). The talk traces developments in my thinking over time and draws links with particular books, chapters and articles to illustrate how I have come “here” from “there”. Interventions in the talk, providing more up-to-date reflections, appear in parentheses in upper-case letters.

… 

“When I was kindly asked to offer a retrospective on my work a thought immediately popped into my mind – I have found that I am increasingly content to describe myself as postmodern in orientation and I had no idea how I had arrived here [NOTE: AT THIS STAGE I AM USING THE TERM “POSTMODERN” WHEREAS NOW I WOULD SAY “POSTSTRUCTURAL”]. I wanted to think about how I became postmodern by default (without even trying).

When I reflected on the influences that might have contributed to the theoretical stance I currently adopt, I identified four:

1. my training as a historian
2. my engagement with feminist theory and feminist epistemology
3. my shift from the discipline of History to the discipline of Politics in 1984

AND

• LIFE!!!

I’m going to trace this intellectual journal through some of my major publications, mostly books.

…

1. LIBERATION DEFERRED? THE IDEAS OF THE ENGLISH-CANADIAN SUFFRAGISTS, 1877-1918. UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS 1983 (REPRINTED IN 1986 and 1989).

I grew up in Montreal, Canada. Received my PhD in History in 1976 from McGill University. The thesis finally emerged in published form as Liberation Deferred? in 1983 (reprinted 1986, 1989).

Note the question mark after Liberation Deferred?  I would like to pretend that this might have signaled the beginnings of a postmodern ambivalence and uncertainty. Actually, it was a very pragmatic response to publishers who said that, between 1976 (when I wrote the thesis) and 1983, when it was to be published, the debate had moved on and I needed to signal that I was aware of these developments. In response I added a question mark to the existing thesis title. The publishers were satisfied!

You may recall that I listed my background in History as one of the factors influencing my current theoretical stance. This connection has several reasons:

1. History in my view, with its focus on the particular, creates ambivalence about grand claims. Some would say it is “atheoretical”. Perhaps now we could say it is postmodern. 
2. My thesis/book is a history of ideas. Hence, from the outset I have been interested in what people thought and in what contexts. Foucault makes clear that his genealogical approach is not simply a “history of ideas” but a “history of thought”, a history of what made (particular kinds of) thought possible. Still, I think that training as an intellectual historian creates the kind of curiosity about how people think about things that is quite close to some of Foucault’s work.
3. I encountered E. H. Carr’s What is History? (1961) in my study of the philosophy of history. Skepticism about claims to truth (or ‘fact’) was born. 

• NATURE-NURTURE ARTICLE.

Bacchi, C. (1980). The nature-nurture debate in Australia, 1900-1914. Historical Studies, 199-212.

I arrived in Australia in 1976 and started teaching (tutoring) Australian History at the University of Newcastle in that year.

I became interested in turn-of-century Australian history, in particular some of the scientific debates that were going on about how to shape the new Australian “man”. Unsurprisingly, I had encountered some of these ideas among my middle-class English-Canadian suffragists [NOTE: THE SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT WAS MOST ACTIVE AT THE TURN OF THE 20^TH CENTURY AND MANY SUFFRAGISTS WERE URBAN REFORMERS AND INTELLECTUALS]. 

In this 1980 article I argue that beliefs about the respective roles of nature and nurture tended to reflect political agendas (with lots of overlaps and ambiguities, of course). That is, those who held out hope that the Australian environment could produce a new, healthier “type” tended to support environmentalism (nurture) while those skeptical about environmental claims invested their hope in the “new genetics” (nature).

In a sense I was arguing (without realizing it) that ideas did not necessarily line up with “truths”, at least not in any conventional sense.

INTERREGNUM # 1 (1984-1990): (def: a period of absence of some control, authority, etc.) 

1. I joined the Politics discipline/department.
2. I read Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality Vol. I.
3. My second marriage broke up.
4. I started researching, writing and teaching feminist theory. 

• SAME DIFFERENCE: FEMINISM AND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE (Allen & Unwin, 1990; re-issued by Routledge 2024 as part of their Revival Series).

This book brought together my history background and my immersion in feminist epistemology.

I read Sandra Harding (1995) on “strong objectivity” and Donna Haraway (1988) on “situated knowledges”. Genevieve Lloyd (1993) helped me put the “man of reason” under the microscope.

I developed a healthy questioning of the intellectual traditions that had dominated my training.

I began (more and more) a trend I had started in the nature-nurture article, examining how people came to think and argue certain things and in certain ways.

My topic in the 1990 book (Same Difference) is how feminists, historically and currently, use the language of “sameness” and “difference” (from men) for a whole range of reasons including their intellectual location and the way in which context affected the feasibility of particular political stances. I developed this argument not knowing specifically where this kind of analysis located me theoretically. I wasn’t interested in those sorts of questions (though I can remember puzzling over how feminism and postmodernism could possibly be compatible). Where I stood in 1990, I was simply telling it like it was/is. 

• AN ARTICLE I PUBLISHED IN 1992:

Bacchi, C. (1992). Affirmative Action—is it un-American? International Journal of Moral and Social Studies, 7(1): 19-31.

I mentioned my move to the Politics department/discipline as the third key influence shaping my current (2006) theoretical position. This occurred for two reasons. Until this point in time, I had no labels to attach to the kinds of thinking I was doing. The shift to Politics began the long, slow process of making these languages available to me.

The second reason is that I arrived in Politics with no particular commitment to its precepts or concepts. I think this disregard (easier when one comes to a discipline later in one’s intellectual development) is healthy. It allowed me to put the concepts/precepts associated with the study of “politics” under scrutiny, to ask where they came from, instead of accepting them as “truth”.

So, in this article (entitled “Affirmative Action: Is it un-American?”) I examined the historical genesis and trajectory of the concept of “political culture”, and how it featured in debates about affirmative action. I still didn’t really think about what I was doing in terms of theory. I didn’t see the article as an example of Foucauldian genealogical analysis (which it was). One thing I did realize was that I was developing greater and greater skepticism about the nature of the academic enterprise. The realization that ideas were promulgated and defended for a range of reasons, few of which had any connection to a desire for “truth”, became central to my thinking.

• THE POLITICS OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: “WOMEN”, EQUALITY AND CATEGORY POLITICS (Sage, 1996)

This realization bore fruit in my first major explicitly theoretical work, The Politics of Affirmative Action. In that book I declared myself committed to a view that concepts have no fixed meaning, that language is a tool deployed in accomplishing a range of tasks. I applied this theory to the experience of affirmative action in the six countries that were supposed to be leading the way in developing effective affirmative action policies for women (the United States, Canada, Australia, Sweden, the Netherlands and Norway). I discovered the range of mechanisms by which progressive change was kept in check. Overall, these mechanisms reflected the importance of meaning making in politics – the power to make meaning. 

• WOMEN, POLICY AND POLITICS: THE CONSTRUCTION OF POLICY PROBLEMS (Sage, 1999).

These ideas culminated in my 1999 book, which argues that, in order to understand how policy operates, we need to understand how policy “problems” are represented.

In Women, Policy and Politics I develop an approach to policy, called ‘What’s the Problem Represented to be?’. I have described the approach, based on five questions (with a number of sub-questions), as a lay person’s guide to deconstruction. [NOTE: IN WOMEN, POLICY AND POLITICS (1999) AND IN THESE 2006 COMMENTS I AM STILL REFERRING TO FIVE QUESTIONS IN WPR. BY 2009 AND THE PUBLICATION OF ANALYSING POLICY (PEARSON EDUCATION) THE WPR APPROACH HAD SIX QUESTIONS. BY 2016 IN POSTSTRUCTURAL POLICY ANALYSIS: A GUIDE TO PRACTICE (PALGRAVE MACMILLAN) SELF-PROBLEMATIZATION, WHICH HAD ALWAYS APPEARED IN CHARTS LISTING THE QUESTIONS, NOW APPEARED AS STEP 7. THIS CHANGE WAS MADE NECESSARY DUE TO THE FACT THAT RESEARCHERS HAD TENDED TO IGNORE THIS IMPORTANT PART OF THE ANALYSIS.]

The WPR approach is very popular in the Scandinavian countries and in Canada, and in Australia it is used effectively in interpretive approaches to health policy [NOTE: AT THIS TIME I WAS USING “INTERPRETIVE” IN A BROAD SENSE; I LATER DREW DISTINCTIONS BETWEEN POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND INTERPRETIVISM – SEE Bacchi, C. (2015). The Turn to Problematization: Political implications of contrasting interpretive and poststructural adaptations. Open Journal of Political Science, 5: 1-12.]

In Women, Policy and Politics (1999) I used the language of discourse and believed I knew (fully) what it meant [NOTE: I WENT ON TO EXPLORE VARIED UNDERSTANDINGS OF DISCOURSE IN Bacchi, C. (2005). Discourse, Discourse Everywhere: Subject “Agency” in Feminist Discourse Methodology’. NORA: Nordic Journal of Women’s Studies, 13(3): 198-209. Reproduced in C. Hughes (Ed.) (2012). Researching Gender. Sage Fundamentals of Applied Research Series.]

I started to ask questions about subjectivity and read more postructuralist feminist theory, especially by those trained in psychology (Potter and Wetherell 1987; Davies 1994; Blackman et al. 2008).

The “What’s the Problem Represented to be?” approach offers a way to analyse representations, but it retains a place for talking about lived experience and even exploitation. [NOTE: IN SUBSEQUENT PUBLICATIONS I CHALLENGE WHAT APPEARS HERE AS A CONTRAST BETWEEN “REPRESENTATIONS” AND “THE REAL”. SEE ANALYSING POLICY, 2009, P. 35 WHERE I SAY: 

A problem representation therefore is the way in which a particular policy “problem” is constituted in the real. 

BY 2012 I CHANGED THE LANGUAGE TO REFER TO THINGS ‘as the real’ RATHER THAN ‘in the real’. See 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, pp. 141-56.

ALSO NOTE THAT THE ACRONYM ‘WPR’ DID NOT EMERGE UNTIL 2009 IN ANALYSING POLICY.]

I continue to worry less about whether, or not, my ideas are theoretically consistent than in my conviction that they are useful.

There is a simple logic here. If our categories of analysis (including our theories) are human constructs (see The Politics of Affirmative Action, 1996), it is just possible that they may not capture everything that needs capturing. 

From the beginning I have developed ideas and then found labels when they suited. I intend to continue in this tradition and, if the labels don’t fit, it doesn’t worry me. 

INTERREGUM #2 [1992 and beyond]:

I mentioned LIFE as the fourth influence on my current postmodern disposition.

1992: I gave birth to my son, Stephen. I had expected life to go on as usual and enrolled him in a childcare centre at 3 months old. Somewhere, in the back of my mind, the belief that feminism had delivered on the promise to make the work/care nexus navigable exerted a powerful influence. But then Stephen became very ill. He developed a feeding disorder that meant I had to take all my long-service leave (6 months) to care for him, one on one. During my next long-service leave (in 2000) I wrote up our story as a memoir (see next item).

• FEAR OF FOOD: A DIARY OF MOTHERING (Spinifex Press 2003).

On many occasions, including when I was trying to convince Susan Hawthorne from Spinifex Press to publish my book, I referred to Fear of Food as my “postmodern moment”. This comment was usually accompanied by a sly smile, almost apologetic.

By calling it my “postmodern moment” I meant that here was the story of one mother and her child and just maybe this story would resonate with the life of some other mother and her child. However, there was another reason for writing the book – I believed that the messages it contained about the inflexibility of our workplace structures would, through this book, reach a wider audience than my conventional academic writing. I continued and continue to believe that it is possible to talk about “one woman’s story” and institutional inflexibility. 

So, how postmodern am I? And does it matter?

Since Fear of Food I have been asked whether anything in the experience of that piece of writing has carried over to what I do now. I replied that, “No. I’m back to writing dense, theoretical prose that only the few will be able to penetrate”. But that’s not quite the case. I have decided to write an undergraduate text in public policy based upon the “What’s the Problem Represented to be?” approach. It will be called: Problems and Policy: Australia in the World. Deadline – December 2008. [NOTE: IN THE EVENT THE TEXTBOOK WAS CALLED – ANALYSING POLICY: WHAT’S THE PROBLEM REPRESENTED TO BE? published by Pearson Education 2009. I’M MUCH HAPPIER WITH THIS TITLE.]

Importantly, to write this new book I’m having to re-read key writings I have used before. I’m re-reading Foucault and understanding more. I’m understanding that the ‘What’s the Problem Represented to be?’ approach is richer in its understanding and more flexible in its uses than I ever imagined. Some of these insights have been due to examples of its application by talented postgraduates such as Zoe Gill, Angelique Bletsas and Zoe Gordon, and talented undergraduates such as Anne Wilson.

[NOTE; FOR MORE UP-TO-DATE ELABORATIONS OF THE WPR APPROACH AND ITS APPLICATIONS, SEE POSTSTRUCTURAL POLICY ANALYSIS: A GUIDE TO PRACTICE (with Susan Goodwin; Palgrave Macmillan 2016) AND Bacchi, C. (2017). Drug Problematizations and Politics: Deploying a poststructural analytic strategy, Contemporary Drug Problems, 1-12. DOI: 10.1177/009/450917748760.]

Thank you for the opportunity to share this intellectual retrospective with you. I have enjoyed and continue to enjoy the journey. Should you be tempted to follow the same path, some things you could try include: switch disciplines, re-read key texts, keep your mind open, don’t worry if you don’t get something first time around, don’t worry about labels, and have a baby!

I was thinking about this talk the other day as I was listening to Radio National (ABC) – an interview with Mavis Staples of the Staples Singers (‘Respect yourself’). She reflected on what she says when people ask her if she sings ‘gospel’ or ‘blues’ or ‘country’. She answered: “I don’t like categories. I just like to sing”. 

Now, if a theorist says something like this, they are bound to be called “postmodern”. So, why fight it? I decided. Here I stand – postmodern by default.”

… I do hope that this reminiscence proves useful in some way to some readers. Feedback is always welcome. 

All the best

Carol

REFERENCES

Blackman, L., Cromby, J., Hook, D., Papadopoulos, D. and Walkerdine, V. 2008. Creating Subjectivities. Subjectivity 22: 1-27.

Davies, B. 1994. Poststructuralist Theory and Classroom Practice, Deakin University, Geelong.

Harding, S. 1995. “Strong objectivity”: A Response to the New Objectivity Question. Synthese, 104(3): 331-349. 

Haraway, D. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective”, Feminist Studies, 14(3): 575-599.

Lloyd, G. 1993. The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy. NY: Routledge.Potter, J. and Wetherell, M. 1987. Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behaviour. London: Sage

In the preceding entry (30 August 2024) I pose a conundrum for those researchers who wish to draw upon poststructural policy analysis and WPR while retaining a commitment to social justice objectives. I point to the ambiguity involved in this enterprise since poststructuralism puts in question analytic categories, including “justice”. To work past this theoretical concern, I introduce the concept of “doubling practices”, suggesting the need to work with two strategies at the same time – treating social justice as a fixed and desired goal, while opening up conceptions of justice to WPR questions. The intent is to illustrate how these two proposals work together to elaborate new, more inclusive meanings of “justice”. 

Dillon and “justice” 

The previous entry offered the example of Dillon’s (1999) work on international relations and justice. To recapitulate, Dillan argues that it is possible to develop “another Justice” through two steps: first, noting how “normal justice” understands its place; and next, developing “another Justice” that is differentiated from the norm and displaces it. I indicate that this two-step process elaborates the operation of Question 2 in a WPR approach, probing the assumptions/presuppositions underpinning “normal justice” as a means to opening up space to think “justice” differently. 

I use the example of Dillon to show how poststructuralists provide “content” to concepts they problematise. That is, “another Justice” in Dillon, and Deleuze, can be described as a “justice” that challenges the ontological presumption of human beings as independent “fungible” units comprising political “entities”, such as nation-states (see previous entry). Along similar lines, it is possible to read Foucault’s critical analysis of prison systems as endorsing certain “principles”, that is, as giving “content” to social justice proclivities. 

Foucault and “justice”

As an analytic strategy Foucault recommends starting from a “problem” (or question) in the present and understanding the heterogeneous factors that contribute to the emergence of this particular way of organising and governing society. He characterises this approach as “effective history”, “a history of the present” and as genealogy (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 47-48).

Foucault explains his intentions in writing his genealogy of the modern penal system, Discipline and Punish (1979), thus: 

“I didn’t aim to do a work of criticism, at least not directly, if what is meant by criticism in this case is denunciation of the negative aspects of the current penal system. … I attempted to define another problem. I wanted to uncover the system of thought, the form of rationality that, since the end of the eighteenth century, has supported the notion that the prison is really the best means of punishing offences in a society. … In bringing out the system of rationality underlying punitive practices, I wanted to indicate what the postulates of thought were that need to be re-examined if one intended to transform the penal system. … It’s the same thing that I tried to do with respect to the history of psychiatric institutions [in History of Madness 2006]. (Foucault 2020; emphasis added) 

I have highlighted the words “if one intended to transform the penal system” because I think they help us understand what Foucault meant by starting one’s analysis from a problem (or question) in the present – he means starting from a development or issue that in your view needs questioning or challenging. The perspective of the analyst is thus decisive in selecting a topic for investigation, as is the case in choosing particular policies for critical analysis in WPR (see Bacchi 2009: 20). According to Tamboukou (1999: 213), this clear involvement of researchers in picking a starting point for critical scrutiny is not a limitation but a strength of the analysis: it “should be admitted and used by the analyst in an attempt to deconstruct possible arbitrary personal feelings and stances with regard to his/her project”. 

If starting from a “problem” (or question) in the present means starting from something that concerns you or disturbs you, it becomes clear that Foucault-influenced analytic approaches (such as WPR) produce a “critical attitude” (Campbell 2007) or “an ethos of critique” (Jabri 2007). Through this starting point attention is directed to the grounds for what troubles you, providing the barebones of a social justice “agenda”. 

One does not need to dig too deeply to discern the political perspective adopted by Foucault. His desire to “transform the penal system” (and psychiatric institutions) was directly connected to his concern about the marginalisation of prisoners (and patients). As Catucci (2018: 329 ff) elaborates, in Foucault’s view, “in modern times prison has been the main technology by which our societies manage marginality”. Indeed, “all the social oppositions described by Foucault in his work – normal/abnormal, healthy/pathological, mad/reasonable – were built on the contrast between inclusion and exclusion” (Catucci 2018: 330).

Foucault’s social justice agenda involved listening to the prisoners and giving them the political role in our institutions they are denied. On this point it is useful to recall that, in 1971, Foucault co-founded the Information Group on Prisons, a group dedicated to heightening public intolerance towards the prison system by facilitating the voices of prisoners themselves (Hoffman 2012). 

As in Dillon, Foucault starts by clarifying the status and parameters of “normal imprisonment” (see “normal justice” in Dillon) and develops alternatives that produce “another imprisonment” (“another Justice”). The poststructural moment of deconstructive analysis – questioning “normal imprisonment” or “normal justice” – provides guidance to developing more inclusive institutions and practices. The two strategies work together to elaborate new, more inclusive meanings of “justice”. 

In a useful exchange on the work of the criminologist Hulsman, Foucault clarifies his stance further. To summarize much too briefly, Hulsman argued that the majority of violations (“crimes”) escape the penal system without imperilling society. Hence, he suggested replacing the concept of crime with that of “problem situations”, settling most conflicts through non-judicial arbitration and reconciliation procedures (Foucault 2020: 389-390). Foucault found Hulsman’s proposal interesting, but he was concerned that “problem situations” would bring about “a hyperpsychologization around the criminal himself (sic) that will constitute him as an object of psychiatric or medical interventions, with therapeutic aims” (Foucault 2020: 390). 

Needless to say, I was delighted to see Foucault’s objection to identifying certain social groups as “the problem”. Moreover, through the example of imprisonment, we can grasp the rudiments of the concerns that led to Foucault’s major contributions, identified by Catucci (2018: 329 ff) as to do with inclusion/exclusion. The themes of inclusion/exclusion and marginalisation characterise numerous WPR applications (“WPR Network” WPRNETWORK@jiscmail.ac.uk). There is here, as McMahon (2024) identifies, a view of social relations markedly at odds with the world we inhabit. Attempts to change these relations can be associated with the concept of social justice. This conclusion comes with three provisos, which I now proceed to consider.

Challenges for researchers

1. The dilemmas of language use

It is a difficult task to talk about, or even to problematise, “social justice” without invoking other categories of analysis that require critical interrogation. This point is illustrated in the pivotal article by Parkes and Gore (2022) targeting the contradictions and ambiguities involved in “social justice pedagogy”. They identify three common orientations underpinning Foucauldian-influenced poststructuralist theorizing: the critique of universalism, the critique of foundationalism, and the critique of essentialism. They insist that “from a poststructural perspective, the concept of social justice must be problematised, rather than accepted uncritically as a universal truth or desire” – so far so good, I would say. 

Parkes and Gore illustrate what poststructuralism can offer pedagogy through a close reading of Nieto and Bode’s (2008) elaboration of social justice interventions in schools. The purpose in Parkes and Gore is to illustrate the need to “push” the critical analysis further, paying heed to key terms/concepts that may require rethinking. For example, they note that Nieto and Bode suggest “that a social justice perspective means providing all students with the resources necessary to learn to their full potential”. Parkes and Gore endorse the emphasis on providing students with material resources but query the notion of “full potential”. “The very notion of ‘full potential’, or indeed any ‘potential’ that can be measured, assumed or implied”, in their view, needs to be interrogated. Again, I say – so far so good.

However, I want to draw attention to the closing sentence in this useful illustration of a poststructural critical approach: 

“Engaging in pedagogy with all the insights that poststructuralism offers may make the project of social justice pedagogy less grand, but it also equips us with insights that may be marshalled to refuse and resist those discourses that erase difference and naturalise disadvantage” (Parkes and Gore 2022). 

I wish to highlight the reliance of the analysis on the contested concept of “disadvantage”. Joan Eveline’s (1994) classic piece entitled “The Politics of Advantage” explains how a disadvantage discourse operates to target outgroups as needy and in deficit while disregarding the privileges social arrangements accord ingroups. Eveline’s analysis is critically important given the continuing reliance among many reform groups on appeals to redress “disadvantage”. This lacunae in Parkes and Gore does not undermine the usefulness of poststructural interventions; rather, it confirms them, illustrating only the need to be wary of inadvertently adopting concepts weighted in favour of the sociopolitical status quo. 

2. The discomfort of critique

The point just made about the inadvertent reliance on terms that need questioning highlights the discomfort caused by this form of critique. I imagine that Nieto and Bode would be somewhat disconcerted to read Parkes and Gore’s analysis of their work. And, I would be curious to know if Parkes and Gore recognise their reliance on the concept of disadvantage.

There is no doubt that poststructural analysis causes disquiet among and between academics. The issue becomes more serious when it involves critiques of lobby or advocacy groups. In a previous Research Hub entry (20 August 2018) I refer to the disagreement between the authors of an article (Pienaar et al. 2018) critical of the ways in which three LGBTIQ health organisations problematise LGBTIQ consumption of alcohol, and representatives of those groups. The organizations’ leaders stressed that, unlike academics who “may be in a position to ignore or sidestep existing policy and political contexts”, they had to “work for change while operating within the existing system” (Ruth et al. 2018: 195). Pienaar et al. acknowledge that 

“As researchers, we engage in similar practices for the purposes of grant funding applications: to attract increasingly competitive research funding, we are obliged to frame research questions as ‘problems’ of national concern requiring urgent attention.” (Pineear et al. 2018: 190).

This example highlights the importance of adopting a self-critical stance on one’s research, a position I describe as “self”-problematisation (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 38-41). Poststructural policy analysis, and the WPR approach, “disrupts the taken-for-grantedness of all policy proposals, no matter how apparently progressive” (Marshall 2012: 61). It calls upon researchers and those campaigning for reform and change to 

“consider the shape of the challenges they pose, the ways in which they perceive and represent ‘problems’, and the reasons for this … we need to reflect upon why certain reform responses get taken up, why others get dismissed, and what happens to reform proposals in the process of being ‘taken up’”. (Bacchi 1999: 7). 

3. The local targets of critique

The kinds of questioning just described help us to see how poststructural analysis targets specific situations and locales. In a previous Research Hub entry (20 March 2022) I describe the importance of context to the WPR approach. The example I use is pay equity where there are debates about the optimal way to institute change, targeting equal pay for equal work, equal pay for work of equal value (otherwise known as “comparable worth”), or wage solidarity (Bacchi 1999: Chapter 4). Through a close examination of Burton et al.’s (1987: 90-94) pay equity intervention and how it produced the “problem”, I argue that in the place of sweeping generalizations about reform approaches – e.g., preferring wage solidarity over comparable worth (or vice versa), there is a need for sensitivity to specific contexts where particular forms of engagement may or may not be possible.

For example, Acker (1989: 196) shows that, in Oregon in the 1980s, constructing the problem as poverty relief (wage solidarity) proved to be a more successful reform strategy than equity agreements which, given the specific labor relations context, appeared to set worker against worker. In tune with Foucault’s own “version of emancipation”, universals are replaced with “specific transformations” that minimize domination (Moss 1998: 9). Such specific transformations constitute forms of social justice.

Conclusion

Returning to the notion of doubling (above), the suggestion in this entry is the need to move between a position in which WPR functions as a social justice strategy and a position in which WPR helps us to see what needs to be questioned in common conceptions of justice (“normal justice”). Both these analytic “balls” are kept in the air at the same time. For the first task social justice assumes a meaningful conceptual intervention; for the second, calls for “social justice” require critical interrogation. The two projects can work together to help refine an analytic strategy. 

REFERENCES

Acker, J. 1989. Doing Comparable Worth: Gender, Class and Pay Equity. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Bacchi, C. 1999. Women, Policy and Politics: The Construction of Policy Problems.London: Sage.

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. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Burton, C., with Hag, R. and Thompson, G. 1987. Women’s Worth: Pay Equity and Job Evaluation in Australia. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service. 

Campbell, D. 2007. Poststructuralism. In T. Dunne, M. Kurki, & S. Smith (Eds.), International relations theory: Discipline and diversity (pp. 203–228). Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Catucci, S. 2018. The Prison Beyond its Theory: Between Michel Foucault’s Militancy and Thought. In E. Fransson, F. Giofrè and B. Johnsen (eds) Prison Architecture and Humans. Olso: Cappelen Damm Akademisk.

Dillon, M. 1999. Another Justice. Political Theory 27(2): 155-175. 

Eveline, J. 1994. The politics of advantage. Australian Feminist Studies 19: 129-54. 

Foucault, M. 1979. Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (trans: Sheridan, A.). New York: Vintage/Random House.

Foucault, M. 2006. History of Madness. NY: Routledge.

Foucault, M. 2020. What is called “Punishing”? In Michel Foucault, Power: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984. Penguin Books.

Hoffman, M. 2012. Foucault and the “Lesson” of the Prisoner Support Movement. New Political Science, 34(1): 21-36. 

Jabri, V. 2007. War and the transformation of global politics. Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Moss, J. (1998). Introduction: The later Foucault. In J. Moss (Ed.), The later Foucault: Politics and philosophy. London: Sage. 

Nieto, S. & Bode, P. 2008. Affirming diversity: The sociopolitical context of multicultural education, 5th Edition, Allyn & Bacon.

Parkes, R. J. and Gore, J. M. (2022) After Poststructuralism: Rethinking the Discourse of Social Justice Pedagogy. In T. K. Chapman and N. Hobbel (eds) Social Justice Pedagogy Across the Curriculum: The Practice of Freedom. Routledge: London.  

Pienaar, K., Murphy, D., Race, K. & Lea, T. 2018. Problematising LGBTIQ drug use, governing sexuality and gender: A critical analysis of LGBTIQ health policy in Australia.International Journal of Drug Policy  55: 187-194.

Ruth, S., Parkhill, N. and Reynolds, R. 2018. A response to Pienaar et al (2018). Problematizing LGBTIQ drug use, governing sexuality and gender: A critical analysis of LGBTIQ health policy in Australia. International Journal of Drug Policy,55: 195-196.Tamboukou, M. 1999. Writing Genealogies: an exploration of Foucault’s strategies for doing research. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 20(2): 201-207

This entry was prompted by the recent publication of McMahon’s (2024) chapter entitled: “Using Poststructural Policy Analysis for Social Justice”. McMahon identifies as an objective “achieving progressive social change” and targets “critical policy analysis as a research method for social justice”. I imagine that many of us share these objectives. McMahon (p. 83) points to an occasion where I refer to “justice goals” and how “we can produce a just society” (Bacchi 2016, p. 8). 

Here I mention a few WPR applications that invoke the concept “justice”. There are many others included in the Master List of WPR applications, distributed through the WPR list (“WPR Network” WPRNETWORK@jiscmail.ac.uk).

            Olsson, D. 2022. From Technocracy to Democracy: Ways to Promote Democratic Engagement for Just Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience Building. Sustainability, 14, 1433.

            Rask, N. 2022. An intersectional reading of circular economy policies: towards just and sufficiency-driven sustainabilities. Local Environment, DOI: 10.1080/13549839.2022.2040467

            McGarry, K. and FitzGerald, S. A. 2019. The politics of injustice: Sex- working women, feminism and criminalizing sex purchase in Ireland. Criminology & Criminal Justice, 19(1): 62-79.

            Mulinari, P. et al. 2023. Exploring Swedish “Family Planning”: Reproductive Racism and Reproductive Justice. In A. Kochaniewicz (Ed.) Struggles for Reproductive Justice in the Era of Anti-Genderism and Religious Fundamentalism. 

            Zemandl, E. J. 2018. The Roma experience of political (in)justice: The case of school (de)segregation in Hungary. ETHOS – Towards a European Theory of Justice and Fairness, European Commission Horizon 2020 research project.
Available at: https://ethos-europe.eu/sites/default/files/ethosd5.2hungary.pdf 

So, “justice” is very much part of the vocabulary adopted in WPR analyses. However, all these invocations of “justice” face a challenge. Sotiropoulos (2021: 851-852) points out that “social justice” is one of the “cherished notions of the western philosophical and political tradition”, problematised in poststructural accounts. We have seen on many occasions that, as a poststructural intervention, WPR questions taken-for-granted categories of analysis. The task in these instances is to see how these categories represent the “problem” they purport to address. For example, the term “equality” is often analysed using WPR – showing how the term can have different meanings with contrasting implications. A large number of WPR applications examine how “women’s equality” is conceptualised in different approaches (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 64-66). 

So, what about “justice”? How can we invoke “justice” without querying different invocations of the term? How, in short, can we describe WPR as a social justice analytic strategy? 

Poststructuralism and “doubling practices”

To pursue these questions, it is useful to adopt what is commonly described as poststructuralism’s “double move”. Lather (2001) introduces the notion of a “doubled research practice” to deal with what she calls “stuck places”: “a way of thinking through of some of the complexities, ambiguities and contradictions involved in the process of doing qualitative research that is concerned with recognizing difference and with pursuing social justice” (Gunaratnam 2003: 3). We have just encountered one such “ambiguity”: how to pursue social justice while subjecting “social justice” to critical analysis. 

A “doubled research strategy” involves working with and against analytic categories at the same time. Gunaratnam (2003) illustrates the usefulness of this strategy in relation to racial categories. While recognising “race” as a constructed category, she points out that dissolving the category of “race” makes it difficult to claim the experience of racism. At the same time, poststructuralist critiques of essentialist notions of “race” can “be used in empirical research to generate more complex insights into the production of social location and experience”. It is therefore possible, and politically useful, to work with and against racial categories. 

 In Mainstreaming Politics (2010), Joan Eveline and I describe this double move as embracing the simultaneous fixing and unfixing of meanings. In that book, for example, at times we adopt the convention of putting “women” and “men” in quotation marks to trouble the categories; at other times we use women and men, without quotation marks, as having an assumed meaning. This shifting of position reflects the complex political circumstances within which we navigate. 

For political reasons it is sometimes necessary to question the category “women” but at other times it is necessary to adopt the category. There is no confusion here. Rather, there is a determination to shape one’s strategy to particular political objectives, with the decisions about when to fix and when to unfix meanings dependent upon reflexive judgment about the political exigencies of the particular situation. The fixed meanings we necessarily impart on some occasions must be regarded as temporary and subject to continuous critical scrutiny in order to elaborate new, more inclusive meanings. The question is not whether to fix meaning – since for a range of reasons fixing must occur – but when to fix meaning and who to involve in the “fixing” exercise.  

To capture this double move in relation to “justice” or “social justice” I suggest approaching the topic through two perspectives: first, reflecting on WPR through a social justice lens; second, questioning “social justice” through a WPR lens. The reference to social justice in the first position has no quotation marks, signalling a desire to fix meaning. The use of quotation marks in the second position signals a willingness to unfix meaning. As a strategic intervention, these two proposals work together to elaborate new, more inclusive meanings. 

WPR through a social justice lens

I locate the first perspective in relation to McMahon’s (2024) chapter. Her goal is to consider how PPA (Poststructural Policy Analysis), and hence WPR, serve social justice objectives. The starting point for analysis is a social justice orientation. This “social justice orientation” comprises policy work and policy practice as “key skills for social justice advocacy” (p. 79). Policy advocacy is linked to a commitment to “give voice to disadvantaged and marginalised groups”. 

McMahon (2024: 82) highlights the usefulness, for social justice concerns, of exploring research policy as a governing technology. As part of this project, she emphasises the role of “policy as discourse” and of problematisations. She includes a variety of WPR applications that “address social justice issues” (2024: 86). Importantly, she notes that 

“All discourses, all reforms and proposals for change (including those of the researcher themselves), whether conservative or progressive, seek to govern conduct in particular ways, and from a poststructural perspective all must be opened up to problematisation in order that there is governing ‘with a minimum of domination’ (Foucault, 1987: 129, cited in Bacchi and Goodwin, 2016: 24)”.

At the same time, the starting point for the analysis is a conception of social justice. As McMahon (2024: 93-94) explains: “There are no ‘rules’ for representing a WPR analysis, and the researcher will need to shape the write-up in a way that best conveys the research story based on the social justice orientation of the analytical work undertaken”. Referring to her research on “value for money”, McMahon (2024: 89) argues that “the dominant economic thinking and assumptions pervading the policy discourse failed to take account of very important social justice perspectives”. Poststructural policy analysis, in this account, “enables the social justice researcher to engage in a deeper critical analysis of the role of policy in constructing social problems in particular ways and potentially undermining social justice principles and values” (McMahon 2024: 94). 

“Social justice” through a WPR lens

While McMahon offers an insightful analysis of the critical perspective associated with PPA, the category of “social justice” continues to function as unproblematised. That is, the notions of “social justice principles” and “social justice perspectives” operate as taken-for-granted concepts with some form of assumed meaning. 

One of the chief tasks undertaken by WPR scholars is the questioning of taken-for-granted categories of meaning – to see what they effect (and affect) and what they fail to effect (and affect). Many applications have made good use of this approach (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 44, 63, 71, 94).

This way of using WPR finds its inspiration in Tanesini’s (1994) argument that concepts have no definite meaning but are proposals about how we ought to proceed from here. As proposals, then, different uses of a term contain implicit representations of the “problem” they purport to address. A way forward, therefore, is to consider different uses of the concept “justice”, probing their underlying assumptions, the genesis of different meanings, their effects and their silences. The analytic strategy adopted here involves applying the WPR questions to “justice”.

Dillon (1999), a well-known postructuralist researcher in the field of international relations, provides links to the kind of thinking and analysis required here. His article invokes Deleuze’s call for “another justice”, “a justice that is different from the justice of the state” (Sotiropoulos 2021: 862). Dillon uses a capital letter for this “other Justice” to distinguish it from “normal justice”. He is concerned that what he calls “normal justice”, characterized as distributive justice, is embedded in conventional state-based politics. Sotiropoulos (2021: 861) also highlights the “statist conception of justice that has dominated political philosophy since antiquity”. That is, “normal justice” presumes nation-states, which become the grounds for determining those called “citizens” and “non-citizens”. 

Digging deeper, Dillon argues that a particular understanding of individual “human beings” underpins this distinction, an understanding of a subject as sovereign and “a fungible unit of account”. From this stance it is a short step, says Dillon (1999: 171), to 

“systems of calculability, commensurability, and expendability which characterise the arithmetic politics and political arithmetics of much of the international relations and strategic studies – military and managerial – as well as the inter and intra genocidal politics of modern times”. 

Hence, to offer “another Justice” it becomes necessary to disrupt these assumptions/presuppositions. For Dillon (1999: 171), “The self that is the place of the taking place of Justice is not a what. For it does not possess an unchangeable essence”. Rather: “The self is a divided self from a beginning that is itself incomplete. It is only by virtue of that very division, that very incompleteness, that the question of justice arises at all” (Dillon 1999: 157). 

Dillon (1999: 157) elaborates how the analytic strategy he deploys assists in developing “another Justice”: “Thought of another Justice is therefore a continuous displacement of normal justice, a radical discomfort to it. But I have first to note how normal justice understands its place before considering the taking place of Justice differently”. He provides more detail: “The other way of thinking has continuously to be contrasted with the thought that underlies distributive justice, so that the characteristic features of another Justice may be differentiated from those of the normal model” (Dillon 1999: 158).

In effect, Dillon’s analysis indicates precisely the sorts of issues that arise when applying Question 2 in WPR to the question of “justice” – “What deep-seated presuppositions or assumptions underlie this representation of the ‘problem’ (problem representation)?” (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 20). We begin by asking how “normal justice” is conceptualised, opening up the space to think of “justice” differently. This way of thinking is captured in the second part of the title for this entry: “‘social justice’ through a WPR lens”. Importantly, Dillon describes this “making way for other ways of being” as a political act, with politics referring to “an irruptive and inventive practice called up by specific historical circumstances”. We pursue these issues in the next entry. 

REFERENCES

Bacchi, C. 2016. Problematizations in health policy: Questioning how “problems” are constituted in policies’, Sage Open, 6(2): 1–16.

Bacchi, C. and Eveline, J. 2010. Mainstreaming Politics: Gendering practices and feminist theory. Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press. 

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

Dillon, M. 1999. Another Justice. 27(2): 155-175.

Foucault, M. 1987. The ethic of care for the self as a practice of freedom: An interview with Michel Foucault on January 20, 1984, with R. Fornet- Betancourt, H. Becker, A. Gomez-Müller, J.C. Gauthier, Philosophy & Social Criticism, 12, 112–131.

Gunaratnam, Y. 2003. Researching Race and Ethnicity: Methods, Knowledge and Power. London: Sage.

Lather, P. 2001. Postbook: Working the Ruins of Feminist Ethnography. Signs, 27(1): 199-227.

McMahon, S. 2024. Using Poststructural Policy Analysis for Social Justice. In K. McGarry, C. Bradley, and G. Kirwan (Eds), Rights and Justice in Research Advancing Methodologies for Social Change. Bristol Policy Press. pp. 79-98. 

Sotiropoulos, G. 2021. Between order and insurgency: Post-structurlism and the problem of justice. Philosophy and Social Criticism, Vol. 47(7) 850–872. Tanesini, A. 1994. Whose language? In K. Lennon & M. Whitford (eds) Knowing the difference: Feminist perspectives in epistemology. NY: Routledge

In a recent chapter in a Handbook on governmentality, I describe “a distinctive family” (Rose 2000, 19) of research questions – usefully described as “how” questions and “how possible” questions (Foucault 1982). These questions are set in contrast to the more common “why” question brought to research on governing. The suggestion is that “how possible” questions provide a more useful starting place for reflecting on complex social relations. Before I consider this proposition in greater depth, we need to get a handle on just what “how possible” questions ask, what a “how possible” question looks like. 

Here are some sample “how possible” questions to start us thinking: “how have certain things (e.g., the psychiatric hospital come to pass?  What is it possible or impossible to think? Under what conditions is it possible to think certain things and impossible to think others? (Gougelet 2014). 

Asking these sorts of questions, explains Foucault, allows us to explore the ways in which power relations are “rooted deep in the social nexus, not reconstituted ‘above’ society as a supplementary structure [for example, “the State”] whose radical effacement one could perhaps dream of” (Foucault 1982, 222). The last comment here about dreaming of radical effacement refers to the temptation to think that it might be easy to target a single/simple source of power (in for example something referred to as “the State”). By contrast in Foucault’s account power relations are “rooted deep” in the social nexus – no simple “solution” here! Dean (1999, 29) describes how, from this point of view, power is “not a zero-sum game played within an a priori structural distribution. It is rather the (mobile and open) resultant of the loose and changing assemblage of governmental techniques, practices and rationalities”.

Let’s linger on this “social nexus” for a moment. To see what Foucault’s analytic target comprises in this term, I propose a hypothetical: “when you ask a ‘why’ question of your material, what kind of answer could you offer?” Most commonly, the form of explanation turns to individuals and their motivations, or to social groups and their ambitions (e.g. “interest groups”). As signalled above there may be a temptation to “blame” “the State”, or some other “structure”. 

For Foucault-influenced analytic approaches these forms of explanation are limited in their usefulness. The position is taken that social relations and social practices are more complicated than these foci allow. These complicated social relations constitute Foucault’s “social nexus”, described by Foucault (2007, 108) as an “ensemble” of “institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations and tactics” through which governing takes place. The challenge becomes finding ways to question this “social nexus”. WPR is offered as one means to open up the “social nexus” to critical interrogation. 

WPR and “how possible” questions

Put simply, the goal in deploying WPR as an analytic strategy is to consider and question how the “social nexus” has come to be. This goal is pursued through looking at how particular aspects of social activities and existence are problematised. A key component of this analysis is the “problem representation”. To reflect critically on identified problem representations, we ask how they become/became possible – how were they possible? 

You may not immediately recognise WPR is this description. Connections with “how possible” formulations become clearer when we examine the WPR questions. Most explicitly, Question 2 (see Chart in Bacchi and Goodwin 2016, 20) asks: “What deep-seated presuppositions or assumptions underlie this representation of ‘the problem’ (problem representation)”. In effect, we are asking what meanings (presuppositions, assumptions, “unexamined ways of thinking” [Foucault 1994, 456], knowledges/discourses) need to be in place for this problem representation to be intelligible (to be possible). To understand how specific policies and their problematisations become possible, it is necessary to identify the forms of thought that made these practices intelligible and practicable.

Consider the example I often use involving the application of WPR to the commonly endorsed reform policy of training schemes for women. These schemes constitute women’s lack of training as “the problem”. They also rely upon certain knowledge forms – e.g., the proposal to train women relies on a particular understanding of how “people” develop “skills” – a behavioural focus in other words – and an ontological conception of “people” as having something called “skills”. The proposal to train women relies upon these meanings to make sense. The knowledges (physiology, psychology, philosophy, etc.) producing these meanings, in effect, make possible the proposal of training schemes. 

Foucault spoke about the need to examine precisely what is done and what is said through considering the “conditions” that are/were necessary to these practices. Asking “how possible” questions destabilizes presumably fixed entities and opens them up to this form of critical interrogation. This approach allowed Foucault to query the assumed “existence” of objects of knowledge, such as “madness” (Foucault 1972) or “sexuality” (Foucault 1986). Asking “how possible” reveals the contingency of assumed “objects” and “subjects”, and the power relations involved in their formation. 

This form of analysis provides the grounds for thinking differently. In relation to his study of prison systems, Foucault (2020) notes that he wanted to indicate what the “postulates of thought” were that need to be re-examined if one intended to transform the penal system. Attention is directed precisely to “what is done” rather than to the motives or intentions of people, which would invoke the interior consciousness Foucault was challenging (see Research Hub, 30 Sept. 2019). The analytic task becomes examining how it is possible for those things to be done, “constructing their external relations of intelligibility” and the knowledges (discourses) upon which they rely (Foucault 1991: 77) The analytic target becomes “the connections, encounters, blockages, plays of forces, strategies and so on” in order “to show that things ‘weren’t as necessary as all that” (Foucault 1991: 76), demonstrating a clear challenge to deterministic views of social relations.

The focus on what is said invites an analysis of “what could be said”, what it is possible to say. Thinking again of our “how possible” formulation (above) – what meanings need to be in place for what is said to be intelligible? where do those meanings come from? Should they be interrogated? Asking, as Foucault (1972, 59) does, “What is it possible to speak of?”, provides a novel and powerful form of political analysis. Poststructural policy analysis aims to study, not people’s views, but how it is possible for such views to exist. 

Jennifer Bonham and I develop this thinking to produce a form of poststructural interview analysis, with the acronym PIA (Poststructural Interview Analysis; Bacchi and Bonham 2016). 

Process 2 in PIA calls for “Producing Genealogies of ‘What is said’”. I provide a brief extract here to elaborate what this involves, with bracketed comments in italics to signal connections with “how possible” thinking: 

Such genealogies look to identify the “conditions” necessary in a particular period “for this or that enunciation to be formulated” [i.e., to be possible] (Foucault 1972: 15 fn 2). Attention is directed to the multitudes of practices—the “processes, procedures and apparatuses” (Tamboukou 1999: 202)—involved in the production of “what is said” as “sayable”, as “within the true” [i.e. as possible]. Take, for example, the comments “I felt depressed” or “We work with mental trauma”. The political target is not how psychology or psychiatry control or label people but all the interconnected practices that make depression and mental trauma apparent and intelligible [i.e., possible], and give these knowledge formations authority. (Bacchi and Bonham 2016, 116).

For both WPR and PIA the focus on heterogeneous relations rather than on “fixity” undermines any sense of linear causality, of one thing (or a few things) causing another – a form of thinking about causation that is common when “why” questions are asked. In a Foucault-influenced analytic strategy, there is a “sort of multiplication or pluralization of causes” (Foucault 1991, 76), a proliferation of “events” as the random results of “the interweaving of relations of power and domination (Tamboukou 1999, 207). “Everything depends on everything else” (Veyne 1997, p. 170): “in Foucault it is not a question of one set of changes ‘influencing’ or ‘causing’ others but of a complex series of interactions which allow the production of possible objects of history” (O’Farrell 2005, 38). 

I trust that this brief excursion into “how possible” questions has provided some indication of what it means to tackle “the social nexus”. I hope it has also produced a curiosity about “how possible” questions and their potential as political interventions. 

I find myself asking frequent questions prompted by keeping “how possible” to the fore in my thinking: “How has this come to be?” “What is assumed if this occurrence is to be taken for granted as truth?” “Where did this thing/position/argument come from?” “What meanings/knowledges/discourses does it rely upon?” “Do I need to question those meanings/knowledges/discourses?” “Do I need to re-think how I assume their credibility?”

Lots of food for thought!

References

Bacchi, C. 2023. Governmentalizing “policy studies”. In W. Walters and M. Tazzioli (Eds) Handbook on Governmentality. Massachusetts: Edward Elgar. pp. 54-71. 

Bacchi, C. and Bonham, J. 2016. Appendix: Poststructural Interview Analysis: Politicizing “personhood”. In C. Bacchi and S. Goodwin, Poststructural Policy Analysis: A guide to practice. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 113-122. 

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

Dean, M. 1999. Governmentality: Power and rule in modern society. London: Sage. 

Foucault, M. 1972. Histoire de la folie a l’age classique [History of Madness in the Classical Age] (Paris: Gallimard).

Foucault, M. 1980. The History of Sexuality, Vol. I. An Introduction New York: Vintage Books. 

Foucault, M. 1982. How is Power Exercised? In H. L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow (eds), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Brighton: Harvester Press, pp. 216–226.

Foucault, M 1991. Politics and the study of discourse, in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon & Peter Miller (eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

Foucault, M. 1994 [1981]. 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. 

Foucault, M. 2020. What is called “Punishing”? In Michel Foucault, Power: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984. Penguin Books.

O’Farrell, C. 2005. Michel Foucault. London: Sage.

Rose, N. 2000. Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought, 2nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Tamboukou, M. 1999. Writing genealogies: An exploration of Foucault’s stra-tegies for doing research. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 20 (2), 201–217. Veyne, P. 1997. Foucault revolutionizes history. In A.I. Davidson (Ed.), Foucault and his Interlocutors, Porter, C. (trans.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press