What Can She Know?

Rose Norman

Department of English
University of Alabama-Huntsville
<rnorman@uahvax1>

 

Code, Lorraine. What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991.

 

When it comes to “knowing,” does it matter who does the knowing? Is knowing independent of the knower, and if not, what is it about the knower that affects the knowing? Canadian philosopher Lorraine Code argues persuasively that whether the knower is a man or woman matters so much that understanding why requires a feminist epistemology. That project involves a paradigm shift in epistemology, from valuing autonomy and objectivity (“pure reason”) to valuing interdependence and subjectivity (communal knowledge); from focusing on the relation of a proposition to reality, to focusing on the interrelationship of subject and proposition in creating knowledge/power.

 

What Can She Know?, a book collecting and synthesizing work begun in Code’s 1981 paper “Is the Sex of the Knower Epistemologically Significant?” Metaphilosophy 1981), is an important step toward articulating the feminist epistemology needed to theorize the interaction of knower and knowing. I suspect the book will be most useful to feminists and to those who already accept postmodern views about the instability of the subject and the constructed nature of reality (as we “know” it). What is characterized as “malestream” philosophy, by far the bulk of what is published and taught about philosophy, is the epistemology against which Code marshals evidence in a complex, nuanced, and deeply engaging argument. Code’s most effective rhetorical aid is her own evenhandedness and clarity in synthesizing a broad array of often-contradictory philosophical positions, from Immanuel Kant to Carol Gilligan, from Aristotle to Sara Ruddick, from Hans Georg Gadamer to Mary Field Belenky.

 

Code manages this in what I would describe as a non-combative discourse that resolutely avoids dichotomizing. She steps into the discursive gap between a deconstructive practice emphasizing undecideability, and the traditional practice emphasizing universality and gender neutrality. Her own practice weaves a web of understanding between those polarities, with gender as her chief point of departure. In staking out an epistemological territory she eventually describes as “middle ground,” Code positions herself between such dichotomizing debates as nature/nurture and essentialism/constructionism, debates that currently occupy many feminist theorists as well as philosophers of all kinds. Her position, moreover, is dynamic, not static, and emerges developmentally in succeeding chapters of the book. For example, her use of “sex” instead of “gender” in the early chapters turns out to be a deliberate retention of the language she and others used when first theorizing these issues. (In a footnote, Code defends this usage on historical grounds, “gender” being a relatively recent usage, “sex” being the term used by epistemologists discussed in her early chapters.) Conceptually, “middle ground” may be the wrong metaphor for establishing a new paradigm for thinking about thinking. “Common ground” seems to be what Code is seeking and what she most successfully achieves. Her critique establishes this common ground chiefly by articulating key feminist theories that challenge widely held beliefs about the procedures for defining and attaining knowledge. Often, she integrates feminist theory with what is useful from such non-feminists as Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, and Foucault. Code is especially effective in adducing what is useful in traditional philosophy, wasting little time attacking what is not useful, except in establishing the ways that what counts as knowledge has traditionally been defined so as to exclude women. Most of her opening chapter is devoted to showing how any claim for “women’s knowledge,” knowledge from a domain assigned to sterotypically-defined “women,” has been declared not-knowledge. Furthermore, she argues, the exclusion does not work symmetrically for men; that is, knowledge from a domain assigned to men has been assumed to be gender-neutral. Men define the norm for defining knowledge.

 

These and other ideas about gendered knowledge, and Code’s debunking of claims for gender-neutrality, are familiar in women’s studies. In fact, Code’s careful documentation of these ideas makes the book very valuable as a bibliographic guide to scores of feminist essays over the last twenty years. But they are not new ideas, and Code’s contribution is more one of synthesizing than of formulating a procedure or practice for the feminist epistemology she sees as a desirable goal. Her accomplishment is to prepare a site for this new epistemology, lay groundwork for the paradigm shift needed for re-visioning the world in ways that no longer contribute to political oppression of women and other devalued groups.

 

Code’s critique of received thinking about epistemology makes four major points:

 

1) Dichotomous thinking polarizes ideas and creates an underclass, the less desirable side of the dichotomy. Dichotomizing also feeds into modes of argumentation that emphasize winning more than understanding, thereby perpetuating political oppression of the underclass. Code avoids dichotomy in various ways, notably by defining knowledge as “inextricably, subjective and objective,” the two supposed opposites being in dynamic interplay in the “creation of all knowledge worthy of the label” (27).

 

2) Objectivity is overemphasized in inquiry. Code recommends reclaiming subjectivity and re-valuing the subject of inquiry. She warns against “autonomy-of-reason thinking,” a style of thinking that claims reason can operate independently of the thinker’s personal locatedness.

 

3) We are all interdependent, our subjectivity formed in relation to others. In this respect, we are “second persons,” a term Code takes from philosopher Annette Baier Postures of the Mind: Essays on Mind and Morals, 1985), and applies broadly as a counter to the prevailing autonomy-of-reason mode. Our own personal locatedness in a particular time, place, class, etc., should be our point of departure for analysis.

 

4) Ideology is a driving force in creating knowledge/power in the Foucauldian sense that the construction of knowledge perpetuates power relations.

 

What counts as knowledge in mainstream philosophy is derived from the sciences, where the focus is on what can be known about “controllable, manipulable, predictable objects” in the physical world (175). Epistemologists have theorized paradigmatic knowledge in terms of object-oriented simples, using the formula “S knows that P” to locate “objective” truth in the physical world in situations like “S knows that the door is open.” Testing the proposition then focuses on the relation of P (the door is open) to physical reality, and ignores the relation of S to P, since the epistemic agent is assumed to be merely a placekeeper, not affecting the truth of what is known. Code challenges both 1) the use of simples tied to physical reality as sources of paradigmatic knowledge, and 2) the notion that the epistemic agent has no bearing on physical reality. Her most telling point in this critique is that the knowledge gained from object-oriented simples is so shallow as to be not worth knowing, and, furthermore, is inadequate for inference into more complex realms.

 

Code’s alternative to the subject-object paradigm is a complex one, friendship (human-human interaction), a paradigm that she proposes as a better relational model than Sara Ruddick’s “maternal thinking” for achieving feminist goals. A feminist epistemology, she argues, is best carried out as an ongoing dialogue between thoughtful and mutually respectful friends. But what of women’s experience, of women as makers of knowledge? Here Code runs head-on into Belenky et al.’s well known Women’s Ways of Knowing (1986; co-authored with Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger, and Jill Mattuck Tarule), a book imbued with an essentialism that Code carefully avoids throughout her text. Code argues that “in the conceptions of knowledge and of subjectivity it presupposes, Women’s Ways of Knowing is epistemologically and politically more problematic than promising” (253) because it is as asymmetric as the “malestream” epistemology it refutes. In the “S knows that P” terminology, the malestream concentrates too much on P, while Belenky et al. concentrate too much on S–so much so that it’s “not easy to determine what their subjects know” (253). They conflate “subjective knowing” with “subjectivism” and consider subjectivism “a permanent epistemological possibility” (254).

 

Code considers this to be “radical relativism” where anything goes; she prefers “mitigated relativism,” her phrase for considering knowledge both subjective and objective, not wholly one or the other. Code is more directly critical of Belenky et al. than of any other scholars whose work she uses, since Belenky’s approach resembles her own in critical ways that Code explicitly identifies, e.g., in having an interest in “second personhood,” valuing connectedness and interpersonal behavior, and locating sources of knowledge in human behavior, rather than in subject-object behavior. Code’s analysis is more nuanced, more postmodern (in denying the possibility of a unified self, etc.), and more political in its recognition of Foucauldian knowledge/power links. Code is exploring the uncharted territory between polarities, the power in “mitigated relativism.” Belenky et al. construct knowing as a progress, through stages, toward increasingly more valued “ways of knowing.” Code suggests a different way of using this material, calling these ways of knowing “strategies” or “styles” of knowing, different positions that can be taken, thus making them more useful for theorizing places for political action. Code’s articulation of an ecological model for “Remapping the Epistemic Terrain” (chapter 7) is the most useful part of the book in addressing key issues feminists are currently debating and in defending “ecofeminism” against criticism of the ideal of community. Code begins the chapter with a description of a board game called The Poverty Game, developed by six Canadian women who depend on public assistance. These “welfare women” become a continuing focus (almost a litmus test) for discussing epistemic privilege, how knowledge is circulated (as well as constructed), and how privileged women and men might learn from a dialogic form of epistemology based on an ecological model. For Code, this ecological model proposes a society that is in dynamic balance, like an ecosystem. Such a society would be “community- oriented, ecologically responsible[,] would make participation and mutual concern central values and would structure debates among community members as conversations, not confrontations” (278).

 

This communal ideal is widespread in women’s spirituality movements today, but has found less support among academics, who are more likely to see only romanticism or idealism in it. Code’s approach to a feminist epistemology reaches out to that ideal in ways that academics can value. She avoids essentializing women’s “nature” by bringing in Teresa de Lauretis’s influential views on “identity politics” and the importance, for feminist projects, of resisting the ideal of a unified self. De Lauretis valorizes “a multiple, shifting, and often self-contradictory identity . . . ; an identity made up of heterogeneous and heteronomous representations of gender, race, and class” Feminist Studies/Critical Studies 9). Code places this dynamic identity in an ecological context, emphasizing fluidity across various boundaries (as in an ecosystem) in creating and acquiring knowledge. In her ecological model, as I read it, people communally and conversationally create knowledge through “dialogic negotiations . . . across hitherto resistant structural boundaries” (309). In this view, thinking itself is “conversational,” and for it to be productive these “conversations have to be open, moving, and resistant to arbitrary closure” (308).

 

While the ecological model is for me Code’s most appealing metaphor–suggesting friendly “conversation” standing in for such natural processes as rivers flowing and life-cycle processes–the ecosystem metaphor is inexact, or, I should say that Code does not herself elaborate the metaphor as I have done. Further, an ecological model holds within itself a potentially essentializing gesture toward “natural” systems that can easily lead to validating the status quo. Code’s resistance to essentialism is most evident in her critique of texts like Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice (1982), Sara Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking (1989), and Belenky et al.’s Women’s Ways of Knowing, to all of which she gives considerable (and perceptive) attention. To achieve the feminist goals Code articulates, what is needed is not a “model” (essentialist or otherwise), but a paradigm shift, a completely different way of thinking about thinking. Gilligan, Ruddick, and Belenky et al. are all, in their own ways, more successful in establishing new paradigms for thinking than is Code.

 

Where Code will draw most fire from critics (those who do not dismiss her project out of hand) is in the attempt to stake out a middle ground, neither wholly essentialist nor wholly constructionist. “Mitigated relativism” is neither a catchy name nor an easily grasped philosophical position, nor is “middle ground” an obvious position of strength, as Code claims it to be. It is simply the place we are left once dichotomous thinking is recognized as a patriarchally constructed double bind: essentialism demands belief in primacy of difference, the very basis on which women have been oppressed; relativism (there is no external, objective reality, only individual realities) stalls political action, there being no external reality to change. So it is the choice that oppresses, or the belief that one must choose. In opting for middle ground, Code is refusing to make that ultimately oppressive choice.

 

The choices Code does make are complex and dynamic, challenging and invigorating to anyone willing to enter the dialogic she invites. There is a quicksilver element to the issues raised: feminist epistemology seems capable of rapidly assuming many shapes, of weaving through narrow and twisting passages, of rising and falling in response to atmospheric pressures. But that is my own metaphor. Code’s figurative language emphasizes analytical (“malestream?”) processes. The metaphor of “remapping the epistemic terrain” suggests the feminist epistemologist as a cartographer systematically pacing through a territory of disputed boundaries and recording results to guide others who choose to come that way. My own metaphor of Code’s “drawing fire from critics” reveals my sense of that terrain as dangerous territory, with enemies in every bush and landmines artfully concealed on the path. In making her way through that dangerous terrain that she calls “middle ground,” Code strikes me as both gutsy and careful– and well-armed.