C. Wright Mills: power as knowledge of structures
Alvin W. Gouldner: the culture of critical discourse
Dorothy Smith: power and knowledge in the feminist standpoint
Donna Haraway and Patricia Hill Collins: the fractured matrix of power
Variations on the Theory of Power and Knowledge
Contents
C. Wright Mills: power as knowledge of structures
Alvin W. Gouldner: the culture of critical discourse
Dorothy Smith: power and knowledge in the feminist standpoint
Donna Haraway and Patricia Hill Collins: the fractured matrix of power
Joelle is in her forties. She lives with her still-young daughter. Joelle is poor. She works when she can find work in a city with few jobs, fewer each year. Work comes, when it comes at all, seasonally. Joelle and her daughter live in a tiny apartment in a shabby neighborhood. What income they have comes from a government program supporting minor children. Joelle is eligible for additional government benefits. The only catch is that she must provide the name and address of her long-separated but still not legally divorced husband.
Being poor usually means being deprived of many of life’s taken-for-granted resources, including ready access to a computer and the knowledge of how to use it to search for solutions to everyday life problems, like finding a missing person. Joelle was completely at a loss as to how to do this, until a family friend offered to help. In a few minutes on the Internet, her friend located the missing man, who was in prison in a distant state. Armed with this information, Joelle returned to the government office with the address. She was then told that she had to present her case to a judge. She made the court date and offered the information but the judge dismissed the case on the grounds that there had to be a legal divorce or the man, who had been missing for a good decade, had to sign certain papers. This proved if not impossible, very, very difficult. The woman needed to use whatever money she could get to keep her house and home in good enough order for her child. At this point she gave up.
What is the problem here? Obviously, one problem is that knowledge of even the most basic of practical skills is not fairly distributed. Joelle is an intelligent woman. Her troubles in life are, at least partly, her own fault. She has had her struggles over the years and not always found a good way to overcome them. Still, one might ask, ‘Why, in a society liberal enough to offer benefits for the very poor is there no government agent willing to help? And why is access to the means available for helping oneself so full of obstacles?’ She and others know what rights and benefits are available. Some find a way to get them. Some get them illegitimately. But too many have a right to them and are discouraged by the system itself. Joelle is far from alone among those in her circumstances to give up.
The point to be made is that what knowledge we have (or don’t have) in practical life comes up against the forces of wider society, against which even the more knowledgeable are sometimes powerless. Societies may profess generosities of various kinds but few of them make sure that what benefits there may be are provided to those in real and just need. Strange as it may sound, it is reasonable to suppose that, if a government offers support for the very poor, they might send someone – for example, a census taker – door to door to sign people up. Of course they never do except in the most extreme emergencies – floods, earthquakes, epidemics, individual health crises discovered in hospitals, and so forth. One might say that this is too much to expect. Yet governments usually keep pretty good tabs on the number of people in need. They, thus, have knowledge of the extent of a problem. Still, their knowledge does not readily lead to official action. The poor and powerless remain where they are – even in the most affluent of nations. The poor may be able to do more to help themselves, yet the exclusions of most societies are apparently the fault of the structures established to help – schools that don’t educate all, health systems that don’t care for all, social security programs that don’t make all secure.
Somewhere between the two failures – of those in power, and of those in need – one finds the relation between knowledge and power. The poor who lack power are separated by their relative lack of knowledge from the more powerful who know their need is real but fail to act. Someone along the line of Joelle’s search for help – government agents, legal aid societies, judges and others – surely knew enough to realize that she was likely to be in need. Yet none was willing or able to break through the technical barriers to help her. Sometimes a friend or two is not enough. No one with the authority and power to help was willing to use the power of their knowledge to do what they knew needed to be done. The agent knew, the court clerk knew, the judge knew – but none bothered to do enough to determine that Joelle’s need was as real as it is. Power thus works hand-in-hand with knowledge; and vice versa. Power is never simply brute force. In the more modern societies it is nearly always a matter of knowledge. In the interplay of those lacking knowledge, and those with knowledge who refuse to act, lies the sad fact that, in time, the powerless come to accept their fate – which is to say, they come to think of themselves as not deserving the benefits they know very well they have the right to. Somewhere in this sad reality lies the terrible truth that power uses knowledge to encourage those with knowledge to consider their power to be as natural as they consider the fate of the powerless. Power and knowledge are never far apart.
C. Wright Mills: power as knowledge of structures
C. Wright Mills was the first American social theorist to write explicitly about knowledge’s relation to power; and he did it well before the relation between the two was rediscovered and redefined in Europe. In this and other ways Mills was an American original. He read as widely as anyone among American sociologists in his day. At the same time, he has been called a radical nomad as much for the intensity of his intellectual independence as for his personal style, typified by his passion for motorcycles. He was a serious scholar but he was best known for his plain language non-fiction writings – White Collar: The American Middle Class (1951), The Power Elite (1956), The Causes of World War Three (1958) and Listen Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba (1960). It is fair to say that, with the possible exception of David Riesman, no academic sociologist was better known to the general public. Yet, Columbia University declined to promote Mills to full professor.
Among social theorists easily the best known of Mills’s ideas was his definition of the sociological imagination:
The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life of individuals. It enables him [sic] to take into account how individuals, in the welter of their daily experience, often become falsely conscious of their social positions. Within that welter, the framework of modern society is sought, and within that framework the psychologies of a variety of men and women are formulated. By such means the personal uneasiness of individuals is focused upon explicit troubles and the indifference of publics is transformed into involvement with public issues.
(1959: 5)
Mills died in 1962, aged 45, just a few years after this famous text was written. Since the mid-1950s his writings were less and less addressed to academic sociologists, and more and more to the general public. Even his idea of the sociological imagination, and the book of which it was a part, while apparently aimed at sociologists, carried a strong political message. The ideal of the sociological imagination was, in effect, a call for people (and not just sociologists) to see their personal troubles as embedded in society’s structural issues – thus, to turn away from discouraging self-blame to a bold knowledge of the history of societal issues formed in the well-structured public sphere. In practical effect, Mills was setting down a manifesto to use social imagination as a means to knowledge of the wider social forces, and thus to move beyond indifference and despair to engaged political action.
Too often, academics treat the sociological imagination as a methodological device, a means to produce more imaginative data leading to wider knowledge of social things. Certainly this is one of the idea’s entailments but to focus on this one alone is to miss the degree to which Mills, late in his short life, is actually turning sociology on its head by equating its narrow positivism of facts as truth with the self-same implicit positivism of liberal politics, in which facts are instruments of rhetoric without the hard edge of criticism of society at large:
This refusal to relate isolated facts and fragmentary comment with the changing institutions of society makes it impossible to understand the structural realities which these facts might reveal; the longer-run trends of which they might be tokens. In brief, fact and idea are isolated, so the real questions are not even raised, analysis of the meanings of fact not even begun.
(1960: 256)
Mills wrote these words in his important ‘Letter to the New Left,’ the year after he wrote The Sociological Imagination (1959). This text was a manifesto read by young radicals the world over and one of the inspirations for the new left movement of the 1960s. It is important to add that the New Left, along with the Civil Rights Movement, was among the forces that called into question the 1950s culture of conformity that so troubled Riesman and others.
So, for Mills, power and knowledge were part and parcel. Knowledge that reverts to claims built on isolated facts and local perceptions is powerless. The powerful use knowledge to weaken opponents; the powerless suffer it in taking on society’s failures as their own. Mills, thus, called out knowledge, the sacred cow of enlightenment modernity, into the exposed truth of power itself. Mills’s theory of power’s relation to knowledge was not as direct as Michel Foucault’s power-knowledge which was coming into its own at the same time in France. But they were kin, born of a global weariness, not just with war, but with obtuse war mongering, colonizing political powers and deadly state powers of exclusion.
Mills, it should be said, did not discover these ideas until late in life. They were always on his agenda, formed by his reading of Marx alongside academic sociology, of pragmatism alongside Parsons and Merton, of Weber alongside liberal political theory. Of his sources, Weber was, in some ways, the most striking.
Early in his scholarly career, Mills edited From Max Weber (1946) with Hans Gerth. At the time, in 1946, there were but a few of Weber’s key texts in English. Weber’s massive Economy and Society would not be translated and widely available until a University of California Press edition in 1978. Thus American readers without a command of German went first to From Max Weber, which is still, today, a reliable key to Weber’s writings on science, politics and power, religion, and social structures. Of these, none was more important than Weber’s Class, Status, and Party in which he laid out a theory of the relations among economic, cultural and political spheres. Class, of course, was then already a staple, owing to Marx. Likewise it was well understood that in modern democratic societies political parties were basic.
Weber’s essay on class, party, and status was behind the most enduring of Mills’s theoretical innovations; though the three were for Weber, as for Mills, interconnected phenomena, the one that lent Mills’s thinking a distinctive edge was status. Naturally the importance of status rankings was already an important consideration in modern societies where, in contrast to traditional ones, status was meant to be achieved, not ascribed. When one rises through the social ranks there is the likelihood that what status one attains will be a badge of honor – hence, Weber’s expression status honor. This, then, is the means whereby social status transforms into an element of cultural prestige. This, too, was one of the concerns of the 1950s social critics, like Riesman, who saw the preoccupation with conforming other-directedness as a dangerous cultural form. In the words of Vance Packard, status seeking is a consequence of a culture in which achieving a status requires the acquisition of the symbols and fads whereby that status is made evident. Kings inherit their crowns and domains. The new American middle class achieved their second cars, kitchen gadgets, scrubbed children, and tract homes with picture windows exposing the family’s up-to-date televisions. These were all far more than family values, houses, and the tools of a new middle-class life. They were symbols exhibiting the fact that address was that of ones who merited a certain honor due to their status.
Yet, the status of most who achieve a marginal elevation over their rural or working-class origins can be real but fragile, and far from a sure thing. This is the subject of Mills’s 1951 book White Collar: The American Middle Class. In general, the book can be viewed as a systematic historical discussion of the extent to which Marx’s idea that the working proletariat (in the 1950s, the wage-earner) is the primary victim of the dominant, bourgeois owners of industry. By the 1950s in America, it could not be denied that there had emerged a new middle class of white collar workers who achieved a certain status superior to the wage-earners. Not only that, but, in a fashion Marx could not have anticipated, they were bourgeois in their ways: work was increasingly in offices, thus white collar; the new middle class earned enough to buy homes of their own; they pursued the middling values of those who aspired to something more while achieving something less than their dreams. Still, in a manner different from, but not unlike, Marx’s idea of the exploited workers, the white collar worker was, and is, subject to the less overtly cruel but still arbitrary whim of the dominant managerial class. Their salaries were always modest. Their positions could be taken away in a sudden down-turn of business. They could be ordered about, even if in a more reasoned language than nineteenth-century bosses of industry may have deployed. Thus, said Mills, the new middle class suffered a constant threat of status panic. What they had was real but in an instant it could disappear and the arbitrariness of their status was the tool by which management controlled them. They sought and had status of a kind, yet they could never be certain of what they had. The American rich got richer, the American middle class remained, at first, static then, in time, many slipped back closer to the status of their wage-earning parents and grandparents. Thus it is clear that Mills’s insight in White Collar was based on a version of Weber’s theory of the interplay of class, status and party. Class, if economic, is never merely economic. Statuses are sought after because cultural prestige is important in the modern system. But when attained, they are never settled. The new rich seek more wealth; the newly middle class seek to hold on to what they have.
In 1956, in his most famous book, The Power Elite, Mills completed his account of the instabilities of postwar America. Here his subject is typified by the theme of the book’s first chapter, ‘The Higher Circles.’ In particular, Mills put the emphasis on the then (and probably still) most powerful American elite sectors – the economic, the political, and the military, of which he said:
The higher circles in and around the [economic, political, and military] command posts are often thought of in terms of what their numbers possess: they have a greater share than other people of the things and experiences that are mostly highly valued. From this point of view, the elite are simply those who have the most of what there is to have, which is generally held to include money, power, and prestige – as well as all the ways of life to which these lead.
(1956: 9)
Here he offers the clearest and most systematic outline of his Weberian theory of class, status, and power. The Power Elite analyzes in fine detail the workings of the power elite in all these respects – as celebrities, as the corporate rich, as warlords.
Mills’s exposition of the history, tastes, powers, and cultures of the power elite made the lasting contribution of being the first description of the interlocking directorate of the postwar American dominant strata. In this, Mills solved a problem that Marx left unsolved. If power, as Marx held, is from the societal top down then how does the dominant class do its dirty work? Mills’s answer: By sharing common interests and a common elite culture, and by interacting behind the scenes in the higher circles. Ever after, sociologists, especially in America, took this notion of an interlocking directorate as a fundamental point of departure for the study of power in society. For Mills, it should be noted, their power was as much in what they know as in what they do. The elite know what their shared interests are, who their status allies might be, and how they can work their will against the much larger number of lesser folk.
What then are the lesser powers to do if they are not to assume that what they lack is their fault? To begin with, they must use their informed imagination to study the ways of the power elite and all other forms by which structural power affects and limits them.
If we took the one hundred most powerful men in America, the one hundred wealthiest, and the one hundred most celebrated away from the institutional positions they now occupy, away from their resources of men and women and money, away from the media of mass communication that are now focused upon them – then they would be powerless and poor and uncelebrated. For power is not of a man. Wealth does not center in the person of the wealthy. Celebrity is not inherent in any personality. To be celebrated, to be wealthy, to have power requires access to major institutions, for the institutional positions men occupy is in large part their chances to have and to hold these valued experiences.
C. Wright Mills (1956) The Power Elite. New York; Oxford University Press, pages 10–11.
Alvin W. Gouldner: the culture of critical discourse
Just more than a decade after Mills’ Sociological Imagination, another book had an even greater impact on American social theory. Alvin W. Gouldner’s The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (1970) took sociology, in particular, but also a goodly portion of the general intellectual culture, by storm. As Mills had declaimed the reasoned needs for a new left, Gouldner wrote in its wake. In a sense, politics in the United States, by the 2010s, was still reeling from a rigid conservatism that was soaked in the dregs of the traditional white Southern Confederacy, which stained the very fabric of its basic values. But in the 1960s, young radicals swore by and meant to advance progressive versions of feminism, GLBT and civil rights, as well as anti-war movements. Gouldner was writing just when the full, if confused, force of late 1960s radical politics and culture was being felt. Many, especially the young, rushed to join in. Others, mostly older and white, hated the whole thing. Though May ’68 in Paris was more emblematic than the American Sixties, it was America that struggled deeply with these revolutionary movements. In a sense, politics in the United States, by the 2010s, was still reeling from the rigid conservatism – rooted in the dregs of the white Southern confederacy, torn at the fabric of the very basic values – that in the 1960s, even young radicals swore by and meant to advance in its versions of feminism, civil rights, gay, and anti-war movements. Though 1968 was the year of a world revolution that sealed the end of the progressive and exploitative modern era, that revolution was experienced differently in America which had so feeble a history with deep historical changes that it had its own reasons for fearing change all the more.
Gouldner did not address his 1970 book to America as such, as Mills had in studying the American social histories after World War II, but there was little doubt that his ideas were aimed at American culture. Though Coming Crisis was about Western sociology, it was directed at America. Gouldner had just ended a long exile in Europe, where he founded the international journal Theory and Society. He brought from abroad a familiarity with European culture and ideas to challenge the vibrant but, as always, still innocent America, especially its young. Coming Crisis was thus almost weirdly preoccupied with destroying the hold Talcott Parsons was thought to still have on American social theory. It was no less critical of how, in his experience in Europe, he saw Marxism, especially Soviet socialism, failing to come to terms with the new world order. Reading the book more than five decades after it first appeared, it is possible to see in it Gouldner’s frustrations equally with the US as with Europe – with, that is, Western social theory. Yet it was too soon for even so brilliant a social thinker as Gouldner to announce a program for political and social change. The one with which he ends Coming Crisis is almost pathetic. He called for ‘the theorist to pull himself together’ by adapting a reflexive attitude that allowed the social theorist to be aware of his own personal intrusions upon theory as much as to be the artful theorist who can stand outside the social order in which he was formed. As it turned out for Gouldner himself (the shadow subject of Coming Crisis), his book was a catharsis that allowed him to begin a project that would consume him for the next decade, and which turned out to be the last one of his life.
Gouldner himself was a firebrand or, as he described himself, a street fighter from the Bronx. Despite this, his most important teacher in graduate studies was Robert K. Merton, who was the most gentlemanly of souls. Yet Gouldner took to him. They remained friends until Gouldner died in 1980; this in spite of their different temperaments and differing intellectual interests. Merton’s influence is evident in the most systematic of Gouldner’s books, Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy (1954), a classic in the field of industrial and organizational sociologies. Plus which, his many articles in major journals – gathered in For Sociology (1975) – were among the most widely cited works by academics in his day. Yet, his street fighter instincts drew him toward Marx and Marxism, and then to the wider world of European, radical social theories.
In the 1970s, Gouldner published a trilogy he called ‘The Dark Side of the Dialectic.’ The first book, The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology (1976), opens with the tell-tale line: ‘this study is about ideologies as a form of discourse, i.e., as a culture of critical speech; i.e., as an elaborated sociolinguistic speech variant.’ The hint here is that this, the first of the trilogy, and the second, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (1979), were his important writings on culture and discourse. The third volume, The Two Marxisms (1980) was published a year later, the year of his death, and served as the most systematic of his critiques of Marxism in its various forms. Gouldner always thought against the grain of one or another tradition of thought, usually sociology and Marxism. This was his theoretical method – new ideas require the old from which they draw their force. ‘Marxism,’ he said, ‘constitutes itself by developing a critique of “ideologies,” by setting itself over and apart from what it calls “ideologies”’ (1976: 5). Thus it was that the single most important, if today still unappreciated, concept was the one announced in the first of these books.
Gouldner’s ingenuity was to see that, by the 1980s, the emergent social form was that formed at the intersection of technology and ideology. Today some might have said technology and culture. But Gouldner, in his day, remained the post-Marxist social theorist for whom culture is basically and necessarily ideology.
Where Gouldner advances the generically Marxist idea of culture as ideology is by recognizing the decisive difference of modern culture as it had come to be clear by his time:
What, then, may be said of the differences between older ideologies, e.g. nationalism, laissez faire, socialism, the supposedly modern ideology which seeks to ground the legitimacy of modern neocapitalism, and bureaucratic socialism in the idea of a technologically guided society? How much has actually occurred, if any, and in what directions, in the transition to the technocratic ideology? … The new technocratic ideology … does not simply claim to produce something better for all, but also claims this happy administration of things is supervised by a kind of secular ministry, the scientists, who are interested in no gain for themselves, and whose work can be judged by its fruits, superior consumerism, comfort, health.
(1976: 257–258)
In other words, Gouldner both recognized the changes occurring in the technological advances of the modern and went straight to their defects. This was the idea that he developed in the second book of the trilogy.
Few books come to mind that say more in a few pages than Gouldner’s The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (1979) where he systematically advances his theory of technological culture. The new class was, already in Gouldner’s day, a well-commented upon phenomenon especially in postwar America where the brilliance of the nation’s scientific and managerial class was considered, rightly, the key to its triumph in war and in economic success in the postwar period. Yet, as few others did, Gouldner began, predictably, with the defects of the Marxist scenario of the new class of modern intellectuals and scientists. In effect, Gouldner appreciated, but went far beyond, Marxism’s economistic interpretation of capital. Thus, he began:
The two most important theoretical foundations needed for a general theory of the New Class will be, first, a theory of its distinctive language behavior, its distinctive culture of discourse and, secondly, a general theory of capital within which the New Class’s ‘human capital’ or the old class’s moneyed capital will be special cases.
(1979: 5)
Gouldner’s New Class comprised intellectuals and scientists, on the one hand, and the scientific administrators of corporate capitalism, on the other. On the surface, though, these would be two quite distinct groups. Yet what was clear in the postwar decades was that they shared more than would have been predicted a century earlier, in the first years of industrial capitalism, when the bourgeois capitalists were the more apparent ruling elite; hence, the expression, New Class.
As the old class stumbles into the future, the production of the New Class grows. Some of the statistics for higher education are relevant: in 1947 (even after the influx of veterans from World War II) there were only some 2.2 million college students in the United States, and they constituted only some 16% of those of college age. From 1955 to 1960 this number increased from 2.6 million to 3.6 million, about 35% of the college age youth. In the 1970s there were some 8 million college students, who were about 40% of the college age youth. … In 1947 the bill for higher education was about one billion dollars, in the early 1970s it was about 25 billion dollars, and is expected to rise to about 44 billion in the 1980s. The New Class is reproducing itself faster than any other class in society.
Alvin W. Gouldner (1979) The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class. New York: Continuum, page 90.
Gouldner’s idea was, in brief, that the modern era advanced beyond mere industrial power by its increasing reliance on new technologies that went far beyond the basic needs of industrial efficiency. In addition, technology became the cultural basis of both scientific and philosophical inquiry. In our time, in the twenty-first century, this is so obvious that one might suppose that Gouldner was saying nothing new. We know that informational technologies are, for all intents and purposes, everywhere. Academic cultures of all kinds, like scientific research generally, would be helpless without technologies for the storage and retrieval of information and sources, as well as for rapid communication. Today, astronomers work with data captured and sent out from the Hubble telescope. Their data, thus, are entirely computer based. Astronomers of distant spaces, thus, do not look through a telescope. They see what is to be seen by interpreting reconstructed visual presentations of events so distant in the long ago and far away as to be, in effect, invisible to the naked eye. In the same way, the student of ancient Greek texts might be able to go somewhere to see the remnants in the originals but more often they read transcriptions available online. Likewise, even the ordinary citizen who has access to a computer searches the world for information, as best she can. Not all of us have the technical knowledge of the advanced technologies upon which the better off depend, but all of us rely at least on the certain basic language required to use them. Today we download mail and data, a notion that would have made no sense in Marx’s day, much less in the early postwar years. Likewise, we search for something or other, most often online – and (sadly) seldom in a library or bookstore.
Gouldner thus realized that even the most elementary forms of scientific or intellectual work had come to require a special kind of language – an ability, that is, to talk about the subject matter at issue in a critical way. It is one thing to hear others use the word ‘download,’ then to repeat it more or less correctly. But quite another to know what it means and, for example, which browser is the best for one’s purposes. ‘I’ve got to go home and download dinner for my kids.’ Versus: ‘They closed iGoogle last November but I think this was a mistake.’ The former is jargon; the latter is a critical discourse. Thus, long before the full implications of his ideas were fully understood, Gouldner proposed that late modern culture was becoming a culture of critical discourse. Here he was borrowing heavily from ideas that were already much discussed in Europe, where both critical theories in general and language-based theories of social process in particular had emerged in the postwar period as tools for rethinking culture. Yet, Gouldner put his own conceptual turn on these movements by arguing, as the critical theorists in Germany did, that no social theory could afford to be less than critical and, as the French structuralists and their opponents did, that discourse was the primary surface of social and political life.
Yet, Gouldner was not a mere optimist. He considered the critical culture of the New Class of intellectuals and technocrats to be a powerful elite, yet also a deeply flawed universal class. The New Class was, thus, a new ruling class that, viewed one way, was more critical, while viewed another way just as much a ruling elite as what came before. Here it is possible to detect the giant steps that Gouldner took in the few years after C. Wright Mills. Mills was critical of the power elite. He believed they more or less knowingly operated in a culture that reinforced their sense of their own rights to power. Thus Mills thought that the new critical political actors could, by applying sociological imagination to their personal lives, become critics of the structured powers and, thereby, a new source of political change. Gouldner, by contrast, claimed that real power in the late modern world lay with all those who possessed the capacity for critical discourse; thus that the capacity to criticize power lay in the very culture that power used to rule. For Mills, power for change was with those outside the power elite; for Gouldner, power was held, and used, inside the ruling elite by virtue of its critical culture.
Hence, the dialectic of technology and ideology (in the words of Gouldner’s earlier book) was the contradictory force inside the ideology of late modern culture that both led to scientific and intellectual advancements and served as an administrative tool for the managing class. Science and technology, thus, are the resources both for human enlightenment and for political authority. The culture of critical discourse was not in an external authority but in the very discourse by which the elite ruled and social criticism used. Power, thus, was becoming universal or ubiquitous (a notion similar to Foucault’s micro-politics). This is a widely shared idea in our time, at least to the extent that we know very well that even the most elementary of political enemies can use information technologies to attack and wound those they hate. If power resides in the workings of this kind of discursive culture, then power is universal and the New Class is, as Gouldner put it, a flawed universal class. If, in effect, power is knowledge, then it is available to all, but, by that fact alone, power is at once liberating and corrupt.
By the time Gouldner settled on his theory of the culture of critical discourse, in Europe Foucault’s idea of power-knowledge was already well known, if slow to come to the attention of American critical theorists. Gouldner, in spite of his sojourn in Europe, remained an American through and through, as he remained, in his way, loyal to his friend Robert Merton. Gouldner’s theory was not, to be sure, straightforward functionalism, but it was nearly as much Weberian as it was Marxian. Gouldner drew on Marxism more than any other major figure, even more than Mills, but he was always as critical of Marxism as he was of sociology. In the end, he opened a new space between the two that illuminated the inherent contradictions and connections between power and knowledge.
Dorothy Smith: power and knowledge from the feminist standpoint
Dorothy Smith is a Canadian sociologist, now retired to British Columbia, and a feminist, a decidedly partisan one. Her enduring importance as a social theorist is that she was among the first to construe feminist theory in direct and robust criticism of sociology’s not so subtle masculinist methodological attitudes. In many articles and books since the 1960s, Smith has written on suicide, the news, Virginia Woolf, mental illness, education, family life, ethnography, and power relations, among other topics. Yet, with rare exception, the range and number of her writings sooner or later turn to a central question of feminist theory, usually referred to as the question of the feminist standpoint: ‘How to develop sociological inquiry from the site of the experiencing and embodied subject as a sociology from the standpoint of women?’ (1990: 1)
Smith was among those feminists, early in the 1970s, who began to think through the implications of feminism as an epistemology, even a methodology, as opposed to a general set of political values. Hence, the feminist standpoint, which, more generally, led to the insight that knowledge is situated in a particular social experience. Smith herself is quite open in admitting that she and others were pushed in this direction by the early women’s movement that, in the United States, grew in part from the Civil Rights Movement, and in greater part from the revolutionary 1960s as a whole. By the 1970s, many activists, including women, were returning to their intended careers in academic life. For them, the question of how a new gender sensibility could alter the traditional canons of learning and methods of research were front and center.
In 1974, Smith published two of her earliest and best-known statements of her feminist sociology: ‘Women’s Perspective as a Radical Critique of Sociology’ (in Sociological Inquiry) and ‘The Ideological Practice of Sociology’ (in Catalyst). Neither appeared in what, at the time, was considered a mainstream journal. Yet, both were read carefully and passed on among the younger feminists in the academy. In the second of these, Smith said ‘A feminist sociology must, it seems to me, begin with actual subjects situated as they actually are; it must be, therefore, an insider’s sociology, a sociology of society as it is and must be known by people who are active in it’(1990a: 36). The striking aspect of statements like this is that, in retrospect, they may seem all too simple, even obvious. Yet, it is important to say, the very basic truth that knowledge ought to begin with an insider’s perspective was, at the time, fresh if disturbing to those with a stake in traditional theories of knowledge.
From these early statements of feminist insider knowledge, Smith developed her standpoint epistemology. Roughly put, she argued that, in their daily lives, women experience a ‘line of fault’ between what they know and what is officially known. They live, therefore, with a ‘bifurcated consciousness’ (1987: 82). Official knowledge – conveyed always in texts as though they were objective – is an ally in the relations of ruling. Objectivity (the insistence on general, thus extralocal, knowledge as the standard of truth) supports ruling. Both aggressively exclude women’s experience. Sociology, insofar as it traditionally insists on objectivity standards, partakes in the relations of ruling. Women, living on this line of fault between the demands of extralocal ruling/knowing and their daily experience of local particulars, possess a unique epistemological standpoint.
It is evident that, in the 1970s, Smith was severely critical of her field, sociology, and by extension other academic methods. Much has changed since she wrote these words. The academy and a good bit of public life have come to appreciate the experience of women and others formerly ignored. Many have also come to see the limitations of objectivism. Yet, the underlying point holds up. Women, and a good many others who are closely tied to the dilemmas of local lives, are even now subjected to official, objective knowledge. In the academy, all forms of experience-based knowing are still, to a regrettable extent, considered insufficiently rigorous. In public life, the poorer neighborhoods are still beset by official educational, social scientific, and governmental sources determining how their children are to be taught, how their poverty is to be relieved, and how their housing projects or districts are to be planned and administered. If you doubt this, just study the work of women and others rejected for tenure; or read a good ethnography of poor neighborhoods; or, for that matter, just ask and listen to those who live in a world where their experiences are devalued. Some things have changed for many, including a good many women, since the 1970s. Still Smith, and other standpoint theorists of so-called second-wave feminism, made an enduring contribution to advancing the importance of local experiences as a powerful source of knowledge, and hence of social theory.
One of the more important features of American social theory as it came to be in the 1970s, is that it broke the mold of inherited and all-too-traditional thinking about knowledge and, even, truth. In Europe the new theories were, in large part, a function of attempts in the postwar period to come to terms with a radically changed social environment for which Marxism, psychoanalysis, and their entailments were the principal sources of criticism. In America the postwar social and economic environments were different, as were the sources American social theorists drew upon. Dorothy Smith, for example, was influenced in some good measure by Marxism but it was a vague sort of Marxism. Even her sharpest structural idea, the relations of ruling, was recast in relation to her interest in women’s experience (for which distinctively American ideas, notably ethnomethodology, were the source). And, generally speaking, there was scant reference to the economic basis for women’s exclusion.
Over the years since her first writings, Smith introduced many elements of nuance to her theory and these, most often, were advanced through a good many empirical studies. Even in her earliest texts, to her credit, she seemed to understand the inherent limitations of any social theory that identified any subject experience as the source of anything like a unique social knowledge. Yet, when feminism, Afrocentrism, radical queer theory, or for that matter radical post-colonial theory, or any strong standpoint theory claim superiority for the subject experience of a given group, their foundational claims soon enough run into difficulties. It is fair enough to reject the narrow, dead-white-gentlemanly culture of the high nineteenth century. But there are problems as well. To rule out sources like, say, Shakespeare or Marx because they are dead white men is, in its way, just as foolish as to ignore the epistemological experience of women, blacks, gays, and others. Some early standpoint feminisms gave into this temptation or, at least, failed to clarify the limits of their theories. Thus in the decades following the first forays into standpoint theory, there emerged a vastly more subtle social theory; and again feminism led the way.
Donna Haraway and Patricia Hill Collins: the fractured matrix of power
Earlier in the 1980s a mysterious paper began to circulate among young feminists. More than a few were puzzled by it. Yet, in 1985, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,’ was published in Socialist Review. Even some among the editorial circles of this well-regarded leftish journal were confused by the essay – not least because it included a strong criticism of socialist feminism while proposing a daringly new kind of radical feminism.
It helps to unravel Haraway’s complex ideas by understanding that, as a student, she studied science, taking her PhD from Yale in biology. Yet, even her doctoral thesis was written from the perspective of philosophy and literary criticism. The subject was the role of metaphoric thinking in experimental biology, published in 1976 as Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth Century Developmental Biology. Yet, since 1984, her academic career has been based in the most important cultural left academic graduate program in the United States – the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Trained in science, she became a feminist social theorist.
Still, it is fair to ask what is a cyborg and what does it have to do with feminist theory? Haraway starts her famous essay with an explanation: ‘Contemporary science fiction is filled with cyborgs – creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted’ (1991: 149–150). She adds that they are also found in medicine where bodies are treated, diagnosed, even inhabited by various machines like heart monitors; also in plant life; and production where, in her words, the production line is governed by a combination of human worker and technologies that reduce the human to a mechanical tool. So, she continues emphasizing the science fiction figure of speech. ‘My cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work’ (1991: 154) As the cyborg is a transgressive being, Haraway is formulating a radical politics.
One might follow her this far and still wonder if this is not just a transgressive way of stating the purposes of socialist politics. Marx himself was surely a transgressor in theory. Yet, Haraway challenges both socialist and (in effect) standpoint feminisms. As socialist politics begin with class, so radical (her word for standpoint) feminisms begin with gender. Both are, thereby, totalizing in that each assumes that a single grand category – class in the one case, gender in the other – can serve as the organizing, deductive origin of all other politics; hence, from class are race, gender, and sexual exploitations derived, as from gender are poverty, racism, and homophobia understood. Haraway’s point is that neither is sufficiently partial. In life, no individual or any group of apparently similar individuals is ever identified by any one essential attribute. The idea is that we (so to speak) are all at once part gendered, part racial, part class-bound, part a sexual type, and so on almost endlessly. Thus what starts as a slightly weird way of doing little more than restating versions of political theories, turns out to be entirely serious in its myth of the cyborg – that we are all made up of unreconcilable aspects; thus by nature individuals are in a given aspect partial, always transgressing themselves and, thereby, any dominant culture that wants to reduce everyone and everything to an essence. The best known concept in ‘The Cyborg Manifesto’ is fractured identities. ‘Identities seem contradictory, partial, and strategic. With the hard-won recognition of their social and historical constitution, gender, race, and class cannot provide the basis for belief in an “essential” unity.’
There are no essences; only transgressions. ‘Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallocentrism’ (1991: 176). Obviously, this is at least a feminism of a new kind, but also a socialism of an interesting kind. At the very least, Haraway is attacking both the dominant culture of the modern West and its theory of knowledge as the articulation of the laws of essences. Her attack is meant to be strategic; which is to say, political.
It is not too hard to see that Haraway is critical of strong standpoint feminisms, at least by default. The important thing to note is that her theory of feminist knowledges is of a kind of knowledge that fractures by transgressing not just essential truths but also the most basic of practical assumptions about the interior and social natures of human beings. There may be in this an implicit accord with standpoint theories in the apparent assumption that in this world women are more cyborgian than men. Yet this interpretation is not apparent in her writings but it is suggested by the fact that Haraway made some of the earliest and clearest statements of the idea of ‘situated knowledges’ – a formulation not at all at odds with Smith’s idea of women’s local experience. But more importantly, Haraway brought to the fore the now evident parallels among the situated knowledges of people of color, gays and lesbians, the poor, as well as women; and treated the idea of situated knowledge as an important aspect of radical identity politics (which is to say, a politics that accounts for the real differences of those who inhabit this world as it is – a social not a psychological matter). Standpoint feminisms were, by and large, sensitive to these parallels; but Haraway made them central not just to feminism theory but to social theory as such. She was not alone.
1990 was a kind of annus mirabilis of feminist social theory in the United States in that two of its late modern classics appeared that year: Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (Butler’s contribution to feminism is discussed further in Chapter 12). As Butler’s book became a turning point in feminist queer theory, so Black Feminist Thought established the fundamental importance of Black women’s experience as both a political and epistemological force in modern life. The miracle year, it should added, came between Gloria Anzaldùa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestizo (1987) and the collection of Donna Haraway’s major essays in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991).
Collins’s Black Feminist Thought, in some ways, was meant to sum up the distinctively American theories of power/knowledge, as is evident in the book’s subtitle: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. As did the other books in and around 1990, Collins’s came to be one of the most influential theoretical texts of the time. This is all the more remarkable because, in 1990, Collins was teaching at a relatively less well-known school, the University of Cincinnati, while also engaged in local community politics. Today she is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, and a recent president of the American Sociological Association, and her work has become required reading in any number of fields, including, interestingly, critical race studies in law schools.
Part of the appeal of Black Feminist Thought is that it is surprisingly plain spoken and straightforward, while making a series of compelling theoretical points that somehow straddle the differences between standpoint and fractured feminisms. Collins’s standpoint is that of African American women who in the United States embody the ways structures of race, gender and class oppress. This is an idea that had been around in the United States since the nineteenth century, but it was Collins who worked it out systematically. In effect, she holds that the African American woman occupies the standpoint of the most oppressed, which requires and allows her at once to see and understand all of the major vectors of power in society. Her knowledge, thus, is her power. Thus to the extent that Collins’s theory is a standpoint feminism it works in an entirely different way from what, for better or worse, has to be called white feminism in America. This is made evident in the way the book is structured.
The major and longest section of Black Feminist Thought is actually a social history of the cultural and social experiences of Black women seen both in their experience in the Black community and in American culture as a whole. She identifies and analyzes the most prominent cultural images of Black women in America – among them, mammies, matriarchs, and sexualized Jezebels. Collins’s method is thereby historical in that she describes the Black Woman’s standpoint as the experience of a number of contradictory forces – never simply male domination, or white racism, or economic exclusion, but all and more at once. In their communities they may be matriarchs in charge of children and men, while in their work world they can be viewed as mammies. From this, it is apparent that Collins’s standpoint is one of individuals whose experience is itself fractured. Here she introduces a notably new and structural idea that she came to call an intersectional paradigm, which she remarks ‘untangles the relations between knowledge and empowerment and sheds new light on how domination is organized.’ She adds at this point her most famous concept: ‘The term matrix of domination describes this overall social organization within which intersecting oppressions originate, develop, and are contained’ (2012: 398).
The important idea behind Collins’s matrix theory is that it locates all members of a society somewhere in the scheme of domination. Thus, even white male members of the dominating class are, in their way, caught in the matrix they control. In a way they are subject to the raw but harsh innocence of a system where, in the United States, Black women (and by extension women of color in America and the world over) are forced into the more inferior social positions in society. Yet, following many thinkers, from Hegel through Du Bois, Collins asserts that those in lesser social positions possess the special knowledge of their experience of living the reality of the vectors of domination. The slave knows the master, while the master is ignorant of the slave (to paraphrase Hegel). In effect the American social system, from the point of view of race, is an especially corrupting contradiction of its high moral self-understanding. In Collins’s way of thinking, the Black Woman’s fractured experience is at once central to her distinctive knowledge and the foundation of her political empowerment.
The long and winding road of social theories of power and knowledge in America has been at considerable odds with the similar path in Europe where Foucault and Habermas – their sharp differences notwithstanding – worked through theories of power/knowledge (Foucault’s term of course) in more direct and explicit terms. This in part is due to the fact that American social theory was slow to read and think through European ideas. But it is also due, in larger part, to the fact that America’s culture of innocence combined with its post-World War II affluence (not to exclude its Red Scare, so-called) to thwart earlier honest considerations of the degree to which knowledge of all kinds is necessarily affected by power relations and implicated in them.
1 In what ways does your day-to-day experience affect the way that you engage with broader social issues?
2 How do you use critical discourse in everyday life? Is it empowering? Can you think of a time where another person using critical discourse has made you feel uncomfortable, or even powerless?
3 How can social theorists make use of insider knowledge?
4 What are the elements that make up your identity? Are there conflicts between them?
5 What does it mean to be located in the matrix of domination? For yourself? For others?
C. Wright Mills
The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956)
The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959)
Alvin W. Gouldner
The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology: The Origins, Grammar of Future of Ideology (New York: The Seabury Press, 1976)
The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class: a frame of reference, theses, conjectures, arguments, and an historical perspective on the role of intellectuals and intelligensia in the Modern Era (New York: Continuum, 1979)
The Everyday World As Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1987)
Texts, Facts, and Femininity: Exploring the Relations of Ruling (London: Routledge, 1990)
Donna J. Haraway
Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991)
Patricia Hill Collins
Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1991)