Epistemology and Oppression
| Date | 01 September 2002 |
| Published date | 01 September 2002 |
| Author | Valerie Kerruish |
| DOI | 10.1177/096466390201100306 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
OPPRESSION
VALERIE KERRUISH
RETURNING, and returning for the purposes of seeing a beginning
anew: I take that as my frame for this article and its engagement with
Images of Law. The occasion for the return, the counting of years,
would be empty of meaning were the possibility of ideas for a forward jour-
neying not there. I suppose too that there could be little ground for return-
ing other than the coercion of duty or interests, had, in between, it been
concluded that the whole thing was a mistake from the beginning, the whole
thing being politically motivated critique of law. There are and should be
doubts. There are questions of the politics of critical legal theory and more
specifically of the relation between politics and epistemology. In my view,
however, the leitmotif of Images, the idea that it is a legitimate aim of legal
theory to describe and subvert an ideology inhering in legal institutions,
practices and thought which presents the possibility of freedom as an illusion,
is more than ever defensible.
The conviction of chapter 5, ‘Epistemology and Oppression’, is that a
particular epistemology is necessary for effective, emancipatory political
action. What raises the necessity is the belief that legal discourse, broadly
understood, is disempowering in that it denies the capacity of non-experts
to act in and on the world in such a way as to take control of their own social
environment. ‘If freedom is an open door in a room, the only problem being
that you cannot see it, then that door does not exist’ (p. 112). The nature of
the necessity is to undo the disempowering effects of this discourse by an
epistemology which explains political action, in the form of building up
working class organization and proletarian power, as a self-conscious
working out of power, rather than as misguided and marginal disaffection.
‘It [the door] does not exist because men will think it an illusion until they
see that they can create and construct that door’ (p. 112). But now, for the
25 years later reader, comes a surprise. There is little elaboration of this epis-
temology, so little in fact, that one could also say that it is lacking despite its
affirmation.
There is thus something that is quite perplexing about the chapter. While
SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 0964 6639 (200209) 11:3 Copyright © 2002
SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi,
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SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 11(3)
being verbally set into a Marxisant paradigm, its execution is almost a
premonition of what was to come. That, broadly, was the demise of Marxism
as the paradigmatically emancipatory theory; the recovery of the mytholog-
ical and metaphorical from modernist ideas of a foundation of reason that is
free from them; and a pluralization of Knowledge to knowledges with rela-
tivization of the latter to values, life-worlds, discourses or standpoint. In the
result and in tandem with a diversification of political concerns, Marxist and
Marxisant paradigms gave way to a variety of approaches: postmodern, post-
structuralist, psychoanalytic, and so on.
How, if only to get past that perplexity, might the radical project of Images
be characterized? So far as epistemology and oppression is concerned, I think
the idea of the times is well captured by Terry Eagleton in Literary Theory:
‘We know that the lion is stronger than the lion tamer, and so does the lion
tamer. The problem is that the lion does not know it’ (1983: 217).
The project of Images is less to impart that knowledge than to constitute
it by taking the struggle against pacification and normalization onto various
legal stages, in chapter 5, the trial. To my mind the radicalism of the project
is in this constitutive aspect. Its advocacy is for turning the trial into political
theatre (p. 117), for investing it with defendants’ political meanings....
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