Laurie Essig

The Sotomayor hearings or an epistemology of objectivity

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="176" caption="Image by stevegarfield via Flickr"][/caption]

Academics live lives isolated from much of the debates and issues that structure the world outside of academe.  We don't really pay as much attention as we should to sports, pop culture, or even Presidential elections.  Many of us spend our entire careers caught up in seemingly esoteric questions about how we know what we know, or, as academics like to say, "epistemology." Every once in a great while, the sorts of arguments that motivate academic life, like how we know what we know, will spill out into the everyday world of politics and culture.  Such is the case with the confirmation hearings of Sonia Sotomayor.  In particular, the issue of "objectivity" continues to structure these hearings as Republican Senators blather on about Sotomayor's now infamous comment that a wise Latina often is a better judge than a wise white man. Sotomayor Defends Ruling in Firefighters’ Bias Case - NYTimes.com. This debate over epistemology and objectivity has been around academe for quite some time. I have seen it pop up regularly in my career.  For instance, when I first arrived at my current institution, Middlebury College, an endowed Chair had just been named for former Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist.  Many of the faculty and students were angered by the Rehnquist Chair because of his record on civil rights (e.g.  as a law clerk,Rehnquist wrote a memo against desegregation in Brown vs. the Board of Ed and cited Plessy v. Ferguson- the 1896 case that established "separate but equal" as constitutional- as good law).  They were also angered by Rehnquist's stand on homosexuality (e.g. the Bowers v. Hardwick decision that allowed two men to be arrested for having sex in their own home because it violated anti-sodomy laws  in the state of Georgia).  Others argued that Rehnquist was "just doing his job" making "objective" decisions based on the Constitution.  The debate raged on for years.  The "objectivists" insisted that the law is impersonal since a thorough understanding of it will lead to "objective" interpretations of it.  The other side insisted that knowledge is never outside of power, but rather always a product of it.  In other words, ways of knowing, epistemologies, are always a product of the position of the knower in the social world. I'm a sociologist, so I see  the debate over William Rehnquist and Sonia Stotomayor through my particular and peculiar discipline.  The debate over whether objectivity is ever possible was present at the very beginning of sociology.  150 years ago  Karl Marx told us that the ideas of the ruling classes are everywhere the ruling ideas.  In other words, what a society knows to be "true" always benefits the people in charge.  But Marx left us a way out of believing in the ideas of the ruling class: consciousness.  For Marx, our lived experiences- like being a Latina or being a worker- shape what we know and therefore often give us a more accurate sense of what is really going on in the world since a worker or a Latina or a working class Latina sees the world as the ruling classes see it (we all do) and also from her own standpoint and therefore has a double (or triple) consciousness. W.E.B. Dubois took that notion of double-consciousness up in The Souls of Blackfolk at the turn of the last century.  DuBois argued that all Black Americans have a double-consciousness, one as American, the other as "Negro."  It is this second sight of the "Negro" that allows her to see injustice for what it is and fight to make America better. Critical theorists from the Frankfurt School continued thinking about epistemologies throughout the middle of the century.  Why, if workers understood the world better than the bourgeoisie, did they not rise up?  The answer, according to Antonio Gramsci, was the "hegemony" of the ideas of the ruling classes.  In other words, the ideas of the ruling class are not just everywhere the ruling ideas, but also so thoroughly control public debate that we cannot escape them.  Hegemonic ideas are "commonsense." Examples of hegemonic ideas in American culture are things like "anyone can make it if  they work hard" or "the law is objective" or "objectivity is possible."  But even hegemonic ideas get brought into question in times of crisis.  Perhaps the 1970s and 80s were that crisis.  Certainly a variety of academic bodies of thought came together during those years (marxism, feminism, queer theory, critical race theory) to thoroughly question any and all claims to objectivity.  According to most of this analysis, "objectivity" is a claim by those who need not be aware of their positions in the social world (in other words, those not marked by race, gender, sexuality, or class- that is, straight, white, monied men).  That the people in charge claim to float outside of their bodies and discern the world from above, an Archimedian viewpoint, must be questioned at every turn. Accross the intellectual barricades, those who claim objectivity insist that it is their "scientific method" or "rational thought" that allows them to escape embodiment, not privilege per se.  According to this set of beliefs, anyone can engage in the methods of science and rationality to escape emodiment. But the feminist, marxist, queer, and critical race academics pooh poohed the objectivists'  methods and their supposed objectivity as missing just how embedded their scholarship and laws were.  Feminist legal scholars like Catherine MacKinnon dismantled the claim that the law is objective and argued instead that the law represents the interests of men over women in her 1989 class Toward a Feminist Theory of State.  Michel Foucault, often labeled the father of postmodernism, saw the law as both repressive of every human impulse and desire and simultaneously productive (of our sense of self as say, homosexuals, or criminals, or law-abiding citizens).  Foucault's Discipline and Punish and the History of Sexuality make clear that laws and penal systems are expressions of power, primarily the power of various forms of expert knowledge.  Pierre Bourdieu gives us perhaps the most complex understanding of the relationship between our place in the social world and what we know in his theory of "habitus" structuring our "tastes".  Habitus builds up over a lifetime but is shaped by our cultural, economic, social, and educational capital.  Habitus is not above power, floating outside the social world, but exists BECAUSE of the amount of power we have in the social world.  Habitus gives us a "taste" for the death penalty or abortion or affirmative action or lawlessness.  Habitus is what a wise Latina has, but also what a supposedly objective wise old white man has. There has been no agreement over whether objectivity is possible in academe.  In fact, there has been an increasing isolation between those who claim objectivity and those who resist such claims.  Mostly the two sides have just stopped speaking to one another.  But now we have this public spectacle, the hearings of Sotomayor, where she is being both criticized for suggesting her epistemology is shaped by her lived experiences and applauded for pointing out that a wise Latina might know more than a wise white man. The stakes are big, but not as big as the Senators grilling Sotomayor or the academics slugging it out in articles and lectures believe. The problem with these life or death fights over whether objectivity is possible is they're not really life and death at all.  In the end, an epistemology of objectivity turns out to be a standpoint epistemology.  In other words, you believe objectivity is possible or not depending on your position in the social world, your standpoint.  If you can escape embodiment through claims to a superior way of knowing, you will.  Who wouldn't?  But if you get told over and over again that you are marked by your race, gender, class, sexuality, or nationality, you'll continue to have doubts that you or anyone else can rise above their embodiment to know the world outside of their position in it.

The Sotomayor hearings or an epistemology of objectivity

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="176" caption="Image by stevegarfield via Flickr"][/caption]

Academics live lives isolated from much of the debates and issues that structure the world outside of academe.  We don't really pay as much attention as we should to sports, pop culture, or even Presidential elections.  Many of us spend our entire careers caught up in seemingly esoteric questions about how we know what we know, or, as academics like to say, "epistemology." Every once in a great while, the sorts of arguments that motivate academic life, like how we know what we know, will spill out into the everyday world of politics and culture.  Such is the case with the confirmation hearings of Sonia Sotomayor.  In particular, the issue of "objectivity" continues to structure these hearings as Republican Senators blather on about Sotomayor's now infamous comment that a wise Latina often is a better judge than a wise white man. Sotomayor Defends Ruling in Firefighters’ Bias Case - NYTimes.com. This debate over epistemology and objectivity has been around academe for quite some time. I have seen it pop up regularly in my career.  For instance, when I first arrived at my current institution, Middlebury College, an endowed Chair had just been named for former Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist.  Many of the faculty and students were angered by the Rehnquist Chair because of his record on civil rights (e.g.  as a law clerk,Rehnquist wrote a memo against desegregation in Brown vs. the Board of Ed and cited Plessy v. Ferguson- the 1896 case that established "separate but equal" as constitutional- as good law).  They were also angered by Rehnquist's stand on homosexuality (e.g. the Bowers v. Hardwick decision that allowed two men to be arrested for having sex in their own home because it violated anti-sodomy laws  in the state of Georgia).  Others argued that Rehnquist was "just doing his job" making "objective" decisions based on the Constitution.  The debate raged on for years.  The "objectivists" insisted that the law is impersonal since a thorough understanding of it will lead to "objective" interpretations of it.  The other side insisted that knowledge is never outside of power, but rather always a product of it.  In other words, ways of knowing, epistemologies, are always a product of the position of the knower in the social world. I'm a sociologist, so I see  the debate over William Rehnquist and Sonia Stotomayor through my particular and peculiar discipline.  The debate over whether objectivity is ever possible was present at the very beginning of sociology.  150 years ago  Karl Marx told us that the ideas of the ruling classes are everywhere the ruling ideas.  In other words, what a society knows to be "true" always benefits the people in charge.  But Marx left us a way out of believing in the ideas of the ruling class: consciousness.  For Marx, our lived experiences- like being a Latina or being a worker- shape what we know and therefore often give us a more accurate sense of what is really going on in the world since a worker or a Latina or a working class Latina sees the world as the ruling classes see it (we all do) and also from her own standpoint and therefore has a double (or triple) consciousness. W.E.B. Dubois took that notion of double-consciousness up in The Souls of Blackfolk at the turn of the last century.  DuBois argued that all Black Americans have a double-consciousness, one as American, the other as "Negro."  It is this second sight of the "Negro" that allows her to see injustice for what it is and fight to make America better. Critical theorists from the Frankfurt School continued thinking about epistemologies throughout the middle of the century.  Why, if workers understood the world better than the bourgeoisie, did they not rise up?  The answer, according to Antonio Gramsci, was the "hegemony" of the ideas of the ruling classes.  In other words, the ideas of the ruling class are not just everywhere the ruling ideas, but also so thoroughly control public debate that we cannot escape them.  Hegemonic ideas are "commonsense." Examples of hegemonic ideas in American culture are things like "anyone can make it if  they work hard" or "the law is objective" or "objectivity is possible."  But even hegemonic ideas get brought into question in times of crisis.  Perhaps the 1970s and 80s were that crisis.  Certainly a variety of academic bodies of thought came together during those years (marxism, feminism, queer theory, critical race theory) to thoroughly question any and all claims to objectivity.  According to most of this analysis, "objectivity" is a claim by those who need not be aware of their positions in the social world (in other words, those not marked by race, gender, sexuality, or class- that is, straight, white, monied men).  That the people in charge claim to float outside of their bodies and discern the world from above, an Archimedian viewpoint, must be questioned at every turn. Accross the intellectual barricades, those who claim objectivity insist that it is their "scientific method" or "rational thought" that allows them to escape embodiment, not privilege per se.  According to this set of beliefs, anyone can engage in the methods of science and rationality to escape emodiment. But the feminist, marxist, queer, and critical race academics pooh poohed the objectivists'  methods and their supposed objectivity as missing just how embedded their scholarship and laws were.  Feminist legal scholars like Catherine MacKinnon dismantled the claim that the law is objective and argued instead that the law represents the interests of men over women in her 1989 class Toward a Feminist Theory of State.  Michel Foucault, often labeled the father of postmodernism, saw the law as both repressive of every human impulse and desire and simultaneously productive (of our sense of self as say, homosexuals, or criminals, or law-abiding citizens).  Foucault's Discipline and Punish and the History of Sexuality make clear that laws and penal systems are expressions of power, primarily the power of various forms of expert knowledge.  Pierre Bourdieu gives us perhaps the most complex understanding of the relationship between our place in the social world and what we know in his theory of "habitus" structuring our "tastes".  Habitus builds up over a lifetime but is shaped by our cultural, economic, social, and educational capital.  Habitus is not above power, floating outside the social world, but exists BECAUSE of the amount of power we have in the social world.  Habitus gives us a "taste" for the death penalty or abortion or affirmative action or lawlessness.  Habitus is what a wise Latina has, but also what a supposedly objective wise old white man has. There has been no agreement over whether objectivity is possible in academe.  In fact, there has been an increasing isolation between those who claim objectivity and those who resist such claims.  Mostly the two sides have just stopped speaking to one another.  But now we have this public spectacle, the hearings of Sotomayor, where she is being both criticized for suggesting her epistemology is shaped by her lived experiences and applauded for pointing out that a wise Latina might know more than a wise white man. The stakes are big, but not as big as the Senators grilling Sotomayor or the academics slugging it out in articles and lectures believe. The problem with these life or death fights over whether objectivity is possible is they're not really life and death at all.  In the end, an epistemology of objectivity turns out to be a standpoint epistemology.  In other words, you believe objectivity is possible or not depending on your position in the social world, your standpoint.  If you can escape embodiment through claims to a superior way of knowing, you will.  Who wouldn't?  But if you get told over and over again that you are marked by your race, gender, class, sexuality, or nationality, you'll continue to have doubts that you or anyone else can rise above their embodiment to know the world outside of their position in it.