We’ll Run Out of Straw, at This Rate
A little wisdom from Foucault. ‘Truth and Power.’
Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it includes regular effects of power…’Truth’ is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements. ‘Truth’ is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it.
That’s a pretty glaring bit of rhetorical sleight of hand. It’s fairly obvious that he’s talking about truth-claims, not truth itself. There’s a big (and important) difference! Obviously truth-claims can be (and often are) power-moves. The same is not in the least obvious in the case of truth itself; in fact it’s not, not to put too fine a point on it, true. Obviously Foucault, not being a fool, must have been well aware of that…but, who knows, maybe he was more intent on persuasion than on scrupulous argument. In fact maybe he was simply acting out his own point – his own truth-claim. An ‘argument’ or rhetorical claim that relies on a brazen equivocation like that is certainly one form of constraint – and a particularly obnoxious one because not explicit, not obvious, not avowed, not out in the open where it can be resisted or at least noted. It takes one to know one, as the saying goes.
Richard Wolin quotes from ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ on page 42 of his The Seduction of Unreason:
The historical analysis of this rancorous will to knowledge reveals that all knowledge rests upon injustice; that there is no right, not even in the act of knowing, to truth or a foundation for truth; and that the instinct for knowledge is malicious (something murderous, opposed to the happiness of mankind.)
That is, as Wolin points out, an astonishing thing to say.
And then there’s Philip Blond. I’ve transcribed a little of the Night Waves discussion, so I’ll quote you a bit. I’ve also googled Philip Blond (and been slightly staggered to find my own mention of him here as the fourth item – now I suppose this mention will be in there too, which makes me feel dizzy). I found this bizarre-looking book on ‘post-secular’ philosophy, listing the most predictable possible trendy names – you can say them in your sleep: Kierkegaard Nietzsche Heidegger Levinas Marion Wittgenstein Derrida Freud Lacan Kristeva Irigary Baudrillard, along with three wrinkly non-trendies. All those dragooned into Blond’s ridiculous project.
I say ridiculous because the things he says on Night Waves are truly ridiculous – the strawest of straw men. Get this:
Philip Dodd: Maybe it’s time to call science’s bluff…[to Blond] Do you think science is overly revered at present?
Philip Blond: I think almost undoubtedly yes. I mean of course in some limited or partial sense science is true, but it by no means is the exclusive or sole model of what truth is. Indeed I would argue that something other than science has to be true if science itself is to be true. Science is wrong in our culture or has become unhinged it seems to me in two ways. First of all in contemporary culture science has converted its harmonic with truth into an absolutism, into a kind of quasi-fundamentalism. Such that it claims to be the sole exhaustive universal model of truth. Secondly, in doing so, it has drained all other accounts, all broader or richer accounts of truth of any value. The absolutization of science has resulted in the relativisation of morality, ethics, aesthetics, anything else you’d care to name.
See what I mean? As if scientists said they were the exclusive or sole model of what truth is, or the sole exhaustive universal model of truth! Sheer silly strawmanism, that’s all that is. And yet Mr Strawman got to do most of the talking, and got to interrupt everyone all the time (I think because he was the first one asked to speak he got the idea that he was sort of in charge of the discussion, so felt entitled and perhaps even expected to control and dominate it. Or maybe he just has an inflated idea of his own importance).
A peculiar confluence, isn’t it, a theologian and Nietzsche and Foucault. But that’s postmodernism for you. Playful.
I have had similar ideas over the last two days about peculiar confluences. Roger Scruton, in ‘Why I am a conservative’ raises precisely the same objections to Foucault as you and I might, but supports a radically different corrective.
I have been reading about Wittgenstein and also reading again Quine’s ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’. It struck me how much the two seem to have in common, and particularly how both would prefer to see science not as a special enterprise, but just a part of the web of knowledge or the use of language in a complex world.
Nietzsche realized that he failed to know. He could have vocalized that no one can be certain that he Knows and leave it at that.
As to Foucault, unfortunatly, I lack both Truth and Power, but Foucault may have accepted the impossibility of abstract Truth. If we dismiss Truth as a feasibility, we are left with our dismal implementation of the concept.
The extract from Blond’s intro to ‘Post-secular Philosophy’ is classic religious twaddle. Man “is born from the highest actuality ” he says. What the hell does that mean? It means nothing, but is just words put together to try to prove nonsense. Using nonsense to prove other nonsense has become a prevailing method in some circles, resembling the scholasticism of medieval times.
“both would prefer to see science not as a special enterprise, but just a part of the web of knowledge or the use of language in a complex world.”
Yeah. Susan Haack says much the same sort of thing in Defending Science – that science is continuous with other kinds of inquiry. I think that’s part of Philip Blond’s straw man – he pretends that scientists claim to be more special than most of them in fact do (as Byatt points out).
“Using nonsense to prove other nonsense has become a prevailing method in some circles…”
Ain’t it the truth. The highest actuality, indeed…
Denying the continuity of science with all other honest intellectual inquiry is a signal of dishonest intellectual gamesmanship, religious or postmodern.
When I teach my critical thinking course (basic intro-level philosophy stuff, fallacies and so on), I basically spend the entire semester conveying two ideas: (1) In the absence of justification, no belief ought to be accepted. (2) The principles of justification are universal, and science is primarily a particularly careful approach to justification.
Once you throw justification out the window, literally *anything* goes. The quintessential po-mo claim that all justification necessarily reduces to power relations does exactly that – and out the window justification goes: Justification is “revealed” as just a reification of the hegemonic discourse which privileges blah blah blah…
Problem is, of course, that the more truth there is to the claim (the more justification really is just a matter of power relations), the less reason you have to believe whatever justification is given in support of the claim. I am continually amazed that a childish fascination with trivial paradoxes of the “This sentence is false” variety became the basis for an entire academic fashion trend. The position is so trivial it can be (and has been repeatedly)dismantled in a paragraph or two!
Which, I think, goes to show that the religious have not yet cornered the market on willful stupidity and blind irrationality – despite making ever-increasing investments in that sector.
“Once you throw justification out the window, literally *anything* goes.”
Exactly. I’ve just spent the morning writing part of a chapter talking about just that. I’ve run into a lot of examples lately, of what glaringly terrible arguers postmodernists can be. It’s kind of fascinating, in a way – because you would think they would embarrass themselves, except if they have as you say thrown the whole idea of justification out the window, well! why be embarrassed? So they give themselves permission to say the most absurd things.
And a large chunk of the humanities gradually swirls down the drain. Wonderful.
Bah. Post-modernism schmodernism. Just keep your eyes wide open.
“I mean of course in some limited or partial sense science is true, but it by no means is the exclusive or sole model of what truth is.”
Just so. Even if science “works”, this does not prove it to be true. It may have proven to be a pragmatic and efficient model for technological progression, but even in its very domain our natural limitations get in the way. Truth is not in the eye of the naked ape. We always need more and better tools and it seems a reasonable to consider that we (still) lack many.
Then there’s the thing with its domain, its very scope. Science doesn’t seem to teach us (how/if/why) to behave honorably, to show compassion or how to be happy or satisfied. Like religion, it is based on self-inspired values. It offers a select and biased set of doctrines to reach a self-proclaimed purpose.
“As if scientists said they were the exclusive or sole model of what truth is, or the sole exhaustive universal model of truth!”
Not precisely, but we do pick our cherries with scientific precision. Scientific doctrine tells us to stick to what we know, which makes us un-vocal about what is beyond our scope. And because the scientific method has been such a popular (dominant) doctrine we seem to have created a bubble of limited truth.
Oh, good. More Blondism.
rhetoric has failed us in instances where an obvious strawman is built. Blond follows Dembski in setting up science to fail any logic test.
We need to find a universal bull shit flag to throw the second philisophical pundits start to set up arguments like this; but I guess a blog is as good as any.
thnks
There is some additional discussion of this post here http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/002038.html
Why so there is. Thanks for the alert. I felt compelled to point out a few things…
Back in the days, very many moons ago, when I was reading and reading up on Foucault, I used to wonder why he presented “epistemes” as so totally emcompassing the whole of society, completely dominating and determining all speech and action, rather than making a distinction between experience and action on the level of ordinary language and everyday interaction and the impositions of paradigms of formal knowledge, until I realized that he basically conceived of human interaction in entirely instrumental-strategic terms, as a relationship between two mutually deceiving self-deceivers, which is truly bizarre. Now, one could criticize such a conceptual trope in “straight” terms: how such a set-up is unsustainable and leads to break-down, how any instrumental or strategic orientation depends positionally on non-strategic or non-instrumental elements in its complex to even come into existence, how it involves performative contradictions, such that such an attitude could never be meaningfully adopted in interaction, so rebarbative is it to the needs and requirements that impel human interaction, that it derives from a “post-anthropological” view-from-outer-space that is, in fact, accessible to no one, etc. Or one could take such a trope as a deliberately provocative assumption of a performative paradox for parodistic purposes, a sort of “Bouvard and Pecuchet” of fallibilism. In turn, one can be simply scandalized by Foucault’s skeptical-relativist Thrasymachian reduction of truth to power-relations and attempt to counter it with a robust defense of “truth” or truth. But isn’t that to take the bait, since if the notion of truth is cross-implicated with that of reality, power-relations are also a part of reality, and thus truth is imevitably implicated in power-relations. If knowledge is power and therefore power is knowldge,- (and is it the anti-dialectical animus that collapses the identity-in-difference into a simple identity?)-, then perhaps a more fruitful tact in countering Foucault would be to draw into question the weakness of his notion of “power”, as the mere name for the “other” of reason, which nonetheless determines reason,- (or, more specifically, Foucault’s own conception of rationality),- an all-encompassing everywhere-and-nowhere that can never be gotten shut of, nor meaningfully identified. What is power and can there be any knowledge of power, its modes and structures, their convertabilities, incommensurabilities, and conflicts? That seems to be what Foucaultian “rationality” let’s pass by the wayside. Of course, we shall never “enter in” to truth as a whole, since the terms of truth shift historically, even as the furious industry of discourse production expands its scope, and we can possess no guarantee that the various terms of truth are integrated into a whole. (Logical pettifoggery would only evade the issue.) So even as we realize that “the truth will never set us free”, the opportunity is afforded to us to examine its relations with power. Perhaps the irony is that the notion of objectivity that always attaches to truth, itself as much an “intentional” as referential notion, implicates its involuntary moment: that truth itself has a power to compel its own recognition, which needs to be distinguished from the compulsion of power. Put in terms of consensus theories of truth, one of the targets of Foucault’s attack from a standpoint of extreme nominalism, the problem is to distinguish true from false consensus and whose consensus? But perhaps the problem is that the source of the compelling power of truth lies not in redundancies concerning truth, but in a non-truth condition: viz. the ethical moment that always inhabits human interaction, though mostly in the form of obliquity. That seems to me in the end what Foucault evades in the name of his thorough-going cynicism,- (c.f. the “Nietzsche” citation in the above post)-, but at the cost of losing the normative resources by which to make his case. After all, it is not that power qua domination is untrue; power, as part of our reality, is all to continuous with its truth. It is rather in the name of justice that its power-relations are brought into question. And truth will not set us free, because freedom is already an “ontological” property of human beings, which is a condition affording us access to the variable conditions of truth. Only the terms of freedom evolve, together with the material accumulations that obscure the quite limited nature of the phenomenon. The real paradox, though, is that, while freedom is always a quite limited phenomenon, the responsibility that attaches to it is irremissible. Hence, though the ways of reflection, of which Foucault’s glittering and labyrinthine sophistries comprise such an imposing product, are necessary to our rational and collective self-understanding, ultimately they must accede to the organization of a praxis which precedes them.
“an all-encompassing everywhere-and-nowhere that can never be gotten shut of, nor meaningfully identified.”
Yes, there is certainly also that angle.
Hey, nice cherry-picking! The above, by the way, amounted to a Neo-Marxist/Levinasian “critique” of Foucault, (as well as, continuing the Rorty “debate”). So, you see, it’s not all a singular hyphenated farrago of “fashionable nonsense”. How do you think I “discovered” Levinas?
‘it’s not all a singular hyphenated farrago of “fashionable nonsense”.’
No indeed. It’s a multiple variegated diverse multivocal contestated fissured indeterminate endlessly deferred ruptured neodeleuzoguattarian pastichated machicolated bricolage of fashionable nonsense.
But that’s just your desciption of the truth; it’s not what is SO, whether anyone thinks it or not. (But, of course, then truth, in traditional philosophical jargon, is transcendent, so that it is SO, so that nobody thinks it.)
No kidding. Another outstanding job of obvious-spotting.
Well, there is the theme, common to Wittgenstein and Heidegger both, that the obvious is precisely what is never noticed, because it’s obvious. And the parenthetical remark, aside from echoing the first line of Heraclitus, indicates a basic problem, which is why Heidegger, in his critique/stepping aside of metaphysics, the most immediate object being the idealist tradition, framed the thematic or topos of “the unthought”, in his project of reflecting upon the prereflective. Though I would by no means be in favor of disparaging common sense in the name of the abstract privilege of theory, the appeal to common sense won’t do as a “solution” to problems of thinking, because its nature and scope are undefined or undelimited and the appeal only serves to make “common sense” itself reflective. (“Common sense”, by the way, derives from the Scholastic term, “sensus communis”, which means that all languages touched by the Latinate tradition have such a term. I don’t know why Anglo-Saxons think that it is their exclusive possession. At any rate, I much prefer the Gramscian deployment of the term to the bluff Anglo-Saxon appeal.) And just to reiterate the obvious, the meaning of “objective truth” is not the same as what *is* objectively truth, which conflation would be the grossest of idealist errors.
The point here is that, in the above post, you failed to make any effective distinction between truth-claims and truth, unless the distinction was between truth-claims and their procedures of justification. And Foucault’s point was focused precisely on the procedures of justification, which he claims to be thoroughly riddled with power relations, since he implicitly conceives of those procedures in operationalist-instrumentalist terms. The really disturbing thing about Foucault’s account is not really his “denial” of truth, which is neither here, nor there, but his reduction of not just truth, but meaning itself to sheer facticity, such that meaning itself is a mere appearance, an epiphenomenal effect of “material” infrastructures that somehow are said to generate power relations, and hence a forteriori “truth”. But if you’re going to try an counter that simply by pointing to the notion of “objective truth” as transcendent, i.e. externally existent, then you’re going to have to account for just who or what does the transcending toward transcendence and how that occurs. That’s where Foucault makes his entry and if extravagant or perverse inferences are objectionably drawn from problems or problematics, then countering them at least requires taking account of the legitimacy of those problems.
Similarly, you apparently failed to grasp what you denounced in Rorty as mere rhetoric. Rorty has made his arguments before, though mostly recycled from elsewhere, and his point remains that the pursuit of a singularly objective reality, which we will someday enter into, is a scientistic idol, which ironically is a hangover from theology, “parousia”. That says nothing about the existence of an external world, nor does it hamper the contiuation of scientific research, but rather takes account of the fact of modern differentiations of domains of truths and norms, with their attendant vocabularies, and of the fact that the very growth of empirical “information” entails, as well, revisions of conceptual frameworks. We simply do not know how far our structures of inference will carry us or when or where they will fail, and we can’t get back behind them to a pre-ordained march of reason. In that light, Rorty’s subsequent writings amount to a set of “rhetorical” tacts with the “therapeutic” aim of persuading or, rather, dissuading the pursuit of the elusive and futile project of attempting to secure that ultimate reality by means of the elaboration of models of rationality in ever more refined logical detail. Disputes about whether water is “necessarily” H2O, after all, add nothing to our empirical knowledge, nor to our understanding of meaning. Granted, there is much that is irritating about Rorty, such as his declaring things “optional” simply because the self-grounding of philosophy in prior “necessity” as a supposed source of supreme authority fails and is to be dispensed with, as if that dispensed with the need and necessity involved in the complexion of reality, or his claim that philosophy should concern itself with (how to get) what we want or should want, which is ambiguous and possibly tone-deaf between what we need or lack and what we desire or will. Most of all, not being a pragmatist, I doubt that pragmatism is adequate to considerations of the constitutive role of language in human affairs, since I don’t think that language is merely an instrument of our convenience, nor that vocabularies can be changed like clothing.
Nota bene: “truth (is) as much an “intentional” as a referential notion”. I’m not insisting on any particular philosophical doctrine, such as phenomenology, so one could substitute the logical terminology of intensional/extensional, or palaverings about the overgeneralized subject-object relation, but the point remains that truth is referential only by virtue of being “intentional”. That is, one can’t simply point and say, “There, that’s truth!”, or, if one can, there is considerable stage-setting involved, such as being presented with a set of options and picking one, which is redundant to the point. Reference, in fact, occurs through the exchange of understandings between language-users, rather than being some special property of the relation between words and things. Similarly, there is no such thing as self-evident evidence. Facts only occur in frameworks, which co-determine their relevance and provenance. One should be asking after warrants rather than facts, that is, statements that show the inferential relations between a body of evidence and a theoretical or conceptual claim. Most of all, reflection on the limits of reason as its basis of validity entails, as a kind of consistency, “intellectual honesty”, that acknowledgment of those limits might “licence”, within those same limits, views and beliefs that one does not hold, disagrees with, or even vehemently opposes. By contrast, going beyond the limits of reason to assert the ultimate rationality of one’s own belief preferences as continuous with the world is the worst sort of “consistency”, the substitution of “truth” for truthfulness. Rationality, which ever version one choses, is a structure of norms, not an objective fact about the world. If you’d stop making such crude “mistakes”, then I’d stop being tempted to comment on them. But then I suspect that such “mistakes” are as deliberate as those of the post-modernists. Binary oppositions, mirror relationships and all that…