“Becoming More Mortal”:  governing through “risk”, “vulnerability” and “underlying health conditions”

I apologize for breaking the flow of promised Research Hub entries, but such is the nature of the times. I felt compelled to say something about modes of governing COVID-19 that are currently (Jan – Feb 2022) being practised. Specifically, I wish to reflect on dominant people categories and their governing effects, including lived and subjectification effects (see WPR question 5; Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 20). The categories I wish to target are interconnected: “underlying health conditions”, “at-risk populations”, “vulnerable groups”, “hospitalization [or death] with COVID as distinct from hospitalization [or death] from COVID”. I intend to consider these issues alongside a narrative of my own experiences to indicate the power and influence of governing categories.

Serendipity 

I have a chronic health condition. It leaves me immunocompromised (immunosuppressed). Notice how I’ve already taken on two categories, and I have only just begun! 

Allow me to digress briefly. In my 2003 memoir, entitled Fear of Food: A Diary of Mothering (Spinifex Press), I reflected on the repercussions of being classified as an “elderly primigravida” when I became pregnant at age forty-four: 

“Being of a certain age for your first child means that you are automatically considered a high-risk pregnancy. … I tried to deny the implications of being labelled ‘high risk’, but we shouldn’t ignore the impact of medical diagnoses on our psyche. In fact, you could say that being called ‘high risk’ was not a way to make you feel relaxed about your pregnancy” (Bacchi 2003: 3). 

This sensitivity to the impact of governing categories was reflected in my 1996 book, The Politics of Affirmative Action, which developed the notion of “category politics”. This concept (which germinated in my pre-Foucauldian days) incorporates the political uses of both conceptual and identity categories. 

With this background, unsurprisingly, I pay close attention to the categories of analysis deployed in responses to COVID-19. Hence, I began to dwell on a category that was receiving almost daily mention in the numerous press conferences by the Prime Minister, State Premiers, Health Ministers and Public Health Officers in Australia. Allow me to note in passing the impact of the pandemic on the status and influence of public health, at least in certain settings, indicated in Australia and overseas in the “rock star” status accorded certain Public Health Officers (see Anders Tegnell in Sweden, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/apm.13112).

The category that drew my attention and my ire was “underlying health conditions”. It started to appear in daily reports of deaths “associated with COVID-19” in November 2021. With my chronic health condition, I recognized myself in the category and wondered about the possible objective in its use. Perhaps the intent was to make “regular” people feel less worried about their possible sickness and death (Laterza & Romer 2020). Or, just perhaps, the category diverted attention from COVID-19 itself and its (mis)management to “underlying” conditions that would probably/possibly do you in. 

And then serendipity!  I was reading Louise Erdrich’s wonderful novel The Sentence at the time of these increasingly disturbed concerns about my chronic condition and COVID-19. She writes:

“The Reports kept saying that those who died had underlying health issues. That was probably supposed to reassure some people – the super-healthy, the vibrant, the young. A pandemic is supposed to blow through distinctions and level all before it. This one did the opposite. Some of us instantly became more mortal. We began to keep mental lists. One morning we started figuring the odds.”

“You get an automatic point for being a woman”, said Pollux, “plus ten years younger. That’s two points.”

“I think we both get a point for having blood type O. I’ve heard type A is more susceptible”. 

“Really? I’m not sure. I’d question that”. 

“We have to subtract those points anyway for being a teeny bit overweight”. 

“Okay, let’s cancel those two factors out”.

“Asthma?”

“I lose a point for having asthma”, said Pollux. “You get a point for not having it”. 

“Although now they’re saying it might not make a difference. But I’ll give you the point”. (Erdrich 2021: 183-184; emphasis added).

But that is me, I decided! Was I keeping score? Not intentionally, but perhaps under the radar I thought – you may have a chronic condition but at least you are not obese, and you don’t have sleep apnoea. Queensland’s Public Health Officer, Dr. Kerry Chant, recently reported that a coroner’s review of deaths of 28 people under the age of 65 infected with  COVID-19 identified both obesity and sleep apnoea as “related” conditions (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10474947/Covid-19-Australia-Kerry-Chant-reveals-sleep-apnea-health-conditions-coronavirus-deaths.html).

It was time to put on my Foucauldian hat before I threw up my hands in despair and surrendered completely to the practices of categorization dominating public debate.

Governing through risk technologies

Dr. Chant drew a connection between “underlying health conditions” and “risk”: “… those who are elderly and those that have underlying health conditions are most at risk of severe disease, hospitalization and death” (https://www.9news.com.au/national/coronavirus-nsw-updates-new-case-numbers-deaths-dance-floor-restrictions-to-end/622c9287-3676-4efb-aa49-0dc4bad2478a

This reference to “risk” is an uncontroversial statement in public health terms. However, that does not mean that it is uncontroversial.

A great deal has been written about “risk”, “risk categories” and “risk technologies” by critical scholars, including those interested in governmentality. The notion of “risk technology”, associated with those researchers, highlights the role of “risk” categories as mechanisms of governing. In a subsequent entry on “data”, I illustrate this point with references to the role of risk categories in welfare governing, in statistical risk assessments in criminal justice, and in predictive risk modelling. 

The governmentality scholar, Mitchell Dean, provides us with a way to think about “risk” and its role as a governing technology. He reminds us: 

“There is no such thing as risk in reality …Risk is a way, or rather a set of different ways, of ordering reality, of rendering it into a calculable form. It is a way of representing events in a certain form so they might be made governable in particular ways, with particular techniques and particular goals”. (Dean 1999: 177)

To come to understand how “risk” functions as a governing mechanism, Dean advises that researchers tease out “the forms of knowledge that make it thinkable”, and “the political rationalities and programs that deploy it” (Dean 1999: 178). 

This approach to “risk” indicates how a WPR analysis can be useful in this context. Instead of generalizing about the notion of “risk” as if it has a set and obvious meaning, we need to identify the knowledges relied upon to give it meaning, and to examine how the concept represents the “problem” in specific circumstances. 

How then does the creation of “the elderly” and those with “underlying health conditions” as “at risk” of disease and death shape governing practices? It could, of course, translate into increased resource allocation or more targeted health services. Or, it could serve to “explain” and explain away higher than usual death rates (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJA8f0BAI4k).

Governments at both the federal and state levels in Australia decided that the practices of relaxing restrictions and opening borders (international and state) in December 2021 needed to be accompanied by a shift in focus from COVID-19 case numbers to the numbers of those hospitalized and of deaths. As the numbers in hospitals rose, Prime Minister Morrison sought a new definition for hospital cases, distinguishing those admitted due to Covid from those admitted for “unrelated reasons” and testing “positive during routine inspections” (Day 2022). As the death toll rose, it became important to offer plausible explanations for this rise that did not draw attention to poor pandemic management practices or to COVID-19 itself, as these deaths could be anticipated (Herrick 2020). “Underlying health conditions” proved to be a useful public health intervention in this regard.

A J P Morgan economist defended the practice of recording the deaths of people who died with COVID-19 separate from those people who died because of COVID-19 – a difficult distinction to make (Trabsky 2020) – lowering the CFR (case fatality rate) in Denmark from 0.045 per cent to 0.027 per cent (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-02-09/denmark-covid-19-pandemic-becomes-endemic/100814004). In Australia Morrison continues to defend the distinction between “passing away with Covid” and “passing away because of Covid” (Daily Mail 16 Feb 2022; https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10517671/Scott-Morrison-says-dying-Covid-not-dying-Covid.html).

I am not suggesting deliberate manipulation in this usage. Rather, I wish to draw attention to the way in which public health knowledge served to make a case about the need to “open up”, a case that would resonate with many in the general population – since we have been told for decades that if we don’t keep the weight off and exercise regularly, we will develop “underlying health conditions”. 

Governing through vulnerability 

At the same time, targeted groups – and these usually include the elderly, people with disabilities, Indigenous peoples, and those with chronic health conditions – are frequently described as “vulnerable”. Indeed, the main riposte to perceived government mismanagement of the pandemic, at least in Australia, is that our “most vulnerable citizens” have been ignored. In this situation it becomes difficult to suggest the need to rethink the category of “vulnerability”, but I believe it is necessary to do so. 

In a previous entry (Research Hub 31 Aug 2020) I described how, in work with Chris Beasley, we challenged a dominant conceptualization in Australian public policy that sets “vulnerable” bodies against other healthy bodies. Vulnerable bodies are seen to reflect a view that people are controlled by their biology, that they are (so to speak) at the mercy of their bodies (Bacchi and Beasley 2002). This view is contrasted to a preferred default position, in which perceived autonomous rational actors keep their bodies in line or “under control”.

There are downsides to both positions – the citizens who are deemed to have control over their bodies become “responsibilized”, and are held responsible for their health outcomes. Petersen and Lupton (1996) argue that public health constructions of risk are premised on the expectation that individuals will govern their own risk-taking practices (see also Nettleton 1997). This perspective is currently endorsed in the federal government’s refrain that, in relation to the pandemic, it is time for Australians to demonstrate “self-responsibility” (SBS News 21 Dec. 2021; https://www.sbs.com.au/news/scott-morrison-urges-personal-responsibility-instead-of-mask-mandates-and-lockdown/1097f6bc-831f-47a8-8970-1b87634d5bca) (on this theme in Sweden see NyGren & Olofsson 2020). Australian government websites offer guidance on “what you can do to reduce your risk or that of someone you care for.”

On the other hand, those characterized as controlled by their bodies – i.e., the “vulnerable” – are constituted as lesser citizens (Bacchi and Beasley 2002). In these cases, Beasley and I highlight the often, inadvertent acceptance of a hierarchical relationship between those who can care versus those who need care. We further characterize this relationship as displaying “the residues of noblesse oblige”, effectively denying the socio-political relations that constitute this hierarchy (Beasley and Bacchi 2007: 293). 

It is important also to note that health promotion programs that target “at risk” populations can be stigmatizing (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 74), singling them out as wanting or weak. Shani (2020) adds that the fact that the most “vulnerable” people are also those of retirement age is significant “for they are deemed surplus to the requirements of a functioning capitalist economy”. They are “disposable” populations (Duffield 2007), expendable, exerting “additional pressures” on government budgets (Australian Government 2013). 

At some level this willingness to accept the deaths of specific groups of elderly people, Indigenous peoples, those with disabilities and those with co-morbidities raises disturbing reminders of eugenic theories and the notion of survival of the fittest (Laterza & Romer 2020). Connections have been drawn between the defence of “herd immunity” as a pandemic strategy and Malthusian population theories (Malinverni 2020). “The ‘herd’ will survive, but for that to happen, other ‘weaker’ members of society need to be sacrificed” (Laterza & Romer 2020). At the same time the “herd” will build up its immunity to SARS viruses. 

I don’t have space here to sort through the competing ideas about the role of heredity in evolution in the 19^th and 20^th centuries (Bacchi 1980), or the distinctions between “negative” eugenics, with its endorsement of compulsory sterilization of the “unfit”, and “positive” eugenics, looking to environmental and hygienic reforms to improve “the race” (Dean 2015: 25). Rather, I’m suggesting that it is useful to take a broader perspective and to think about how policy decisions create the “problem” of “population” – here in terms of “the people” versus “the expendables”. 

Of course, the language of “herd immunity” is less popular today, at least in Australia. Rather, there are suggestions that we should  “let it rip” or, more commonly, that we have to learn to “live with the virus” (https://thewest.com.au/news/coronavirus/the-ashes-scott-morrison-blasted-over-stint-in-commentary-box-c-5221620).

 In any event, the lived effects for members of the disability community, Indigenous peoples, and residents in aged care homes frequently involve severe illness and, all too often, death. 

Ways forward

Beasley and I (2007) suggested that there is a need to develop new frameworks of meaning to rethink the ways in which governmental practices conceptualize bodies. To this end we offer the concept of “social flesh” to bypass the constructed dichotomy between those characterized as controlling their bodies and those deemed to be controlled by their bodies, between the “marketable” and the “disposable” (Shani 2012). 

Our hope is that “social flesh” might serve to disrupt the current dominant neoliberal ethic that privileges autonomous, rational actors who are held responsible for their lives and health, and to highlight the unequal burden of infectious diseases (Research Hub 31 July 2020). “Social flesh” does this by drawing attention to shared embodied reliance, mutual reliance, of people across the globe on social space, infrastructure and resources (Beasley and Bacchi 2007).  

The call by Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General, World Health Organization, to get “all countries to work together to reach the global target of vaccinating 70% of people in all countries by the middle of 2022” indicates recognition of that embodied reliance. In the place of “narrow nationalism and vaccine hoarding by some countries”, he argues, there is a need to negotiate “a global pandemic accord to strengthen the governance, financing, and systems and tools the world needs to prevent, prepare for, detect and respond rapidly to epidemics and pandemics”. https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/2021-has-been-tumultuous-but-we-know-how-to-end-the-pandemic-and-promote-health-for-all-in-2022

The goal, put simply, is for all of us to become more mortal rather than scapegoating those with “underlying health conditions”. 

REFERENCES

Australian Government 2013. An Ageing Australia: Preparing for the Future. Productivity Commission. Available at: https://www.pc.gov.au/research/completed/ageing-australia

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

Bacchi, C. 1996. The Politics of Affirmative Action: “Women”, Equality and Category Politics. London: Sage. 

Bacchi, C. 2003. Fear of Food: A Diary of Mothering. Spinifex Press. 

Bacchi, C. and Beasley, C. 2002. Citizen bodies: Is embodied citizenship a contradiction in terms? Critical Social Policy, 22(2): 324-52. 

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

Beasley, C. & Bacchi, C. 2007. Envisaging a new politics for an ethical future: Beyond trust, care and generosity —towards and ethic of “social flesh”. Feminist Theory, 8(3): 279-298. 

Day, O. 2022. Scott Morrison pushes to reclassify Covid hospital admissions. The Daily Mail, 4 January. Available at: <https://www.dailymail.co.uk › news › article-10365467>

Dean, M. 2010. Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. Second ed. New York: Sage.

Dean, M. 2015. The Malthus Effect: population and the liberal government of life. Economy and Society, 44(1): 18-39.

Duffield, Mark (2007) Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples, Cambridge: Polity.  

Erdlich, L. 2021. The Sentence. Harper.

Herrick, C. 2020. “Syndemics of COVID-19 and ‘pre-existing conditions’”. Somatosphere. http://somatosphere.net/2020/syndemics-of-covid-19-and-pre-existing-conditions.html/

Laterza, V. & Romer, L. P. 2020. Coronavirus, herd immunity and the eugenics of the market. Aljazeera. Available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/4/14/coronavirus-herd-immunity-and-the-eugenics-of-the-market

Malinverni, C. 2020. COVID-19, Scientific Arguments, Denialism, Eugenics, and the Construction of the Antisocial Distancing Discourse in Brazil. Frontiers in Communication, 4 November. Available at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2020.582963/full

Nettleton, S. 1997. Governing the risky self: How to become healthy, wealthy and wise’. In A. Petersen and R. Bunton (Eds) Foucault, Health and Medicine. London: Routledge. 

Nygren, K. G. & Olofsson, A. 2020. Managing the COVID-19 pandemic through individual responsibility: the consequences of a world risk society and enhanced ethopolitics”. Journal of Risk Research, 23(7-8).

Petersen, A. & Lupton, D. 1996. The new public health: Health and self in the age of risk. London: Sage.

Shani, G. 2012. Empowering the disposable? biopolitics, race and human development. Development Dialogue. Available at:  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292469897_Empowering_the_disposable_biopolitics_race_and_human_development

Shani, G. 2020. Securitizing “Bare Life”? Human Security and Coronavirus. E-International Relations. Available at: https://www.e-ir.info/2020/04/03/securitizing-bare-life-human-security-and-coronavirus/

Trabsky, M. 2020. “Died from” or “died with” COVID-19? We need a transparent approach to counting coronavirus deaths. The Conversation, 9 September. 

My sincere thanks to Anne Wilson, Jennifer Bonham and Angie Bletsas for comments on an earlier draft. 

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&nbsp;

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