Theory sounds boring, I admit. It’s the long chapter you must fight yourself through before you get to the fun part of any scholarly work (if you are a nerd like me and consider that fun). Theory is made up of abstract ideas, disconnected from anything practical, and often it wants us to throw a book away and turn to something that has in fact something to say. Sure, this can all be theory.
What’s the Point of Theory?
But I think when done right, theory can also be engaging and exciting! (you heard me right) We don’t need to use theory as a tedious preamble to our work, but I like to think of it as glasses we can put on to see hitherto hidden things and thereby change the way the world appears to us. And I’m not even talking about glasses that correct our vision and sharpen what we already see. If anything, to me theory is the equivalent of night vision goggles that can reveal things that were always here yet completely hidden from our field of vision. And once we perceive them, we are forced to question everything we always assumed and challenge what we considered to be common-sense. To me, theory can therefore be fundamentally unsettling.
For anybody that doesn’t share my enthusiasm for theory, I must make the impression of a manic self-help guru who thinks he has gotten a glimpse of divine truth. Therefore, lets jump right into the matter and see if theory can also have a hold on you.
Standpoint Epistemology
In my last post I introduced the idea of standpoint theory, or standpoint epistemology, which is the idea that all knowledge is socially situated and thus depends on the perspective of the observer. Standpoint epistemology is a colossus of a word, so I will try to break it down before moving on. Well okay, the meaning of a standpoint should be clear – it is the position from which we see something. It is epistemology that might need some explaining: in simple terms, epistemology means the theory of knowledge. An epistemologist is someone that tries to explain how we can know things. For example, if we both look at the sky and agree that it is blue, how do we know whether we see the same color or if we just use the same term to denote a color that in fact appears different to us?
If we combine standpoint + epistemology, we then try to talk about the ways all knowledge is dependent on one’s specific standpoint and does not just float around in some realm of perfect ideas. How is not everything relative? While the approach does not necessarily deny the existence of a single truth, it indeed allows for a plurality of knowledge claims that are all based on different foundations. Yet this does not mean that some standpoints can’t be more valid in specific contexts than others – wouldn’t it be cynical to ask a millionaire how it feels to be poor?
Standpoint epistemology acknowledges the validity of different claims to knowledge, but at the same time the approach also offers a solution to arrive at less biased and more transparent understandings. Our standpoint is always shaped by a set of underlying assumptions that come from our place and role within a larger society. Whether we are aware of them or not, they will determine what we see, what questions we ask and what we can know. Since these biases are given, would it not be better if we had the ability to acknowledge and even critically analyze them to see how they influence us?
Role of Feminism
Standpoint epistemology has been an important resource in feminist research and activism. Central to feminist standpoint theory is the idea that from the lives of the underprivileged and marginalized the dynamics of systems can be better understood, and they should therefore serve as a starting point for analysis. Though ‘feminism’ might suggest an exclusive focus on the lives of women, this is not the case, as the theory can be applied more broadly to all kinds of discrimination based on factors like race, class, religion, sexual orientation, and more. The seed for this reversed hierarchy can already be found in Marx, and Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, but I will spare you additional philosophical ramblings and get to the matter (even though I’m tempted to write another post faking my way through Hegel).
Outsider’s Perspective
The feminist scholar Sandra Harding argues that the activities we engage in throughout our everyday life “organize and set limits on what persons who perform such activities can understand about themselves and the world around them.” It is not unthinkable that a white, heterosexual man coming from a good home and living in a European country has never experienced discrimination based on his race, sex, sexual orientation, or social background. Based on his first-hand experience alone, it might seem like a truthful statement that discrimination does not exist in the society he lives in. However, this does not mean that other people don’t face discrimination based on any of the above factors. The experiences of a Black woman with a non-European name in the very same society can differ immensely from that of the man, whether it revolves around applying for jobs or open discrimination on the streets. The white man’s experience is therefore a bad starting point to analyze the system at large, and instead, in Harding’s words, “the activities of those at the bottom of such social hierarchies can provide starting points for thought.” Take another example: Look at the picture bellow. Notice something?
It’s not the red carpet, but did you see the tiny step? How would a person in a wheelchair overcome this almost insurmountable obstacle? I don’t want to project my ignorance on others, but before engaging more closely with the standpoint theory, I would not have found anything noticeable in the photograph. Doors like these, ‘tiny steps,’ or other impediments to people in wheelchairs exist all over our infrastructure. While society is becoming aware and actively aims to make spaces more accessible, for example with wheelchair ramps, our environment is first and foremost still designed for and by the dominant group – people that can walk.
Common Sense or Situated Knowledge?
What I think is particularly interesting about the example is how we treat different standpoints. It should cause us no issues to identify the description of the step as an ‘insurmountable obstacle’ as the perspective of the wheelchair user, but why don’t we treat the description ‘tiny step’ in the same way? In other words, why is it that the standpoint of the dominant group receives less scrutiny as to who made it and is instead treated like a universal norm? Donna Haraway calls this the ‘God-trick.’ By using neutral and impersonal language, a scientist can create the impression that they are themselves outside the situated, embodied world we all live in and instead, like a God, see “everything from nowhere.” However, Harding reminds us that all kinds of thoughts “bear the fingerprints of the communities that produce them [and] start off from socially determinate lives.” Linking back to the above example, this means that even if around 99 % of us don’t use a wheelchair, the fact that our environment is shaped in a certain way is still based on the lives of us walkers and is thus far from being neutral.
For me, this is like putting on the night vision goggles and seeing something new. All types of knowledge and the ways we understand the world are produced by specific communities whose social realities and embodied lives influence what they can know. But some communities have more power to exert and spread their knowledge claims than others, either through their sheer numbers, but also their relative position in the power hierarchy. Think of politicians, scientists, influencers, or on a larger scale our Western worldview versus third world countries. Because of one’s influential position, their knowledge turns into accepted norms, and things become common-sense that in fact derive from a specific place of inquiry.
Some More Examples
Two examples more to prove my point (and because I think they are in themselves quite mind-blowing). For ages, and still today, medical research tended to neglect diseases that mainly affect women, which can “leave women dismissed, misdiagnosed, and sick.” The issue is that the research community has defined the practice of medicine based on the standards of the male body instead of taking an approach that is more inclusive. Second, search algorithms can also be centered around the lives and experiences of a dominant social group. Researcher Sofiya Noble argues that when in 2009 she googled “black girls,” she was confronted with page after page filled with pornographic content. This is no coincidence, she notes, but Google’s algorithm adopted the longstanding trope of sexualizing black women, reproduced it in a digital environment and thus reinforced the stereotype’s grip on our minds. On the other hand, if a larger variety of standpoints would have been included in Google’s development team, biases like these could have been found and neutralized.
What About Journalism?
I have shown how our knowledge is at last socially situated and by itself not necessarily neutral. While it causes us no difficulty to notice this when we talk about ‘the others’ situated knowledge, it seems that we are less perceptive when it comes to diagnosing the ways our own knowledge is not just common-sense, but by itself the product of a specific community. I will leave it at that for the moment, but in the next post I will aim to explain how this theory can come especially handy when talking about objective journalism and how the ‘God trick’ can be compared to journalism’s maxim of the ‘view from nowhere.’
Works That Influenced My Thinking
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Literary Theory: An Anthology, edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, Wiley Blackwell, 2017, pp. 768-777.
Bowell, T. “Feminist Standpoint Theory.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Harding, Sandra. “Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What Is ‘Strong Objectivity?’” The Centennial Review, vol. 36, no. 3, 1992, pp. 437–70.
Taylor, Sunaura. “Examined Life – Judith Butler & Sunaura Taylor 720p.avi.” YouTube.