French literary criticism

The April Harper's published Bruno Latour's essay, "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?" -- which you can also read on Latour's Web site.

Apropos the Swift Boat discussion below, and the apparent rule in contemporary journalism that says there are two sides to every fact, I was reminded of this essay, and this passage in particular:

What has become of critique, I wonder, when an editorial in the New York Times contains the following quotation from Republican strategist Frank Luntz:

"Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue."

Do you see why I am worried? I myself have spent some time in the past trying to show "the lack of scientific certainty" inherent in the construction of facts. I too made it a "primary issue." But I did not try to fool the public by obscuring the certainty of a closed argument -- or did I? I'd like to believe that, on the contrary, I intended to emancipate the public from prematurely naturalized objectified facts. But was I mistaken? Have things changed so fast?

Perhaps the danger no longer stems from an excessive confidence in ideological arguments posturing as matters of fact -- which we have learned to combat so efficiently -- but from an excessive distrust of good matters of fact disguised as bad ideological biases. While we spent years trying to detect the prejudices hidden behind the appearance of objective statements, do we now have to reveal the objective and incontrovertible facts hidden behind the illusion of prejudices? Entire Ph.D. programs are running to ensure that good American kids learn that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth, that we are always prisoners of language, that we always speak from a particular standpoint, and so on, while dangerous extremists are using the very same arguments to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives. ...

It says something about the sorry state of journalism today that one is forced to turn to French literary criticism to try to understand why it's as bad as it is. Ugh.

(Note: The above version is from Harper's and differs from the translation on Latours' site.)

Comments

[Jeff G]

Let's be honest here. We, as a society, have encouraged and allowed this to happen. Every time we claim "bias", whether it be liberal or conservative, responsible news agencies get nervous about ever disagreeing with anything they hear. If they say the President is lying, and we respond with "you're biased against the President," and if they say that he's telling the truth, and we say that he's biased for him. Is it any wonder that they've given up trying to figue out what's true and just report what's said?

[cjmr]

But isn't part of media objectivity supposed to be that persons in the media aren't supposed to "care" if they are labeled as biased so long as what they have reported is true?

[carla]

Well, I'm certainly not going to take on Latour, but . . .
Even I have argued--rather extensively--about the contextualized nature of facts. That does not mean, and has never meant, that facts are "merely made up," or that there's somehow a way to overcome an inconvenient fact with uncertainty. For a very interesting, and nuanced, version of this, try reading Donna Haraway, particularly "Primate Visions." We want to, and should, have a notion of facts, of proof, of relative certainty (for example, that the earth is round). This does not contradict the notion that we all speak from a particular standpoint. Indeed, I would (and have) argue(d), the fact that we speak to each other, that we have shared languages and shared forms of life (the Wittgenstein in me is coming through) implies that we share standpoints, as well, at least some of the time. We may feel compelled to change our standpoint--for example, to come to believe that slavery is wrong, or to believe that Newtonian physics doesn't tell us all we need to know and that Einsteinian physics adds greater understanding, even as newtonian calculations work perfectly well for a great many engineering problems.

In short, then, the republicans are merely being disingenous, at best, and arguably evil about this whole thing--especially since they're the ones who want to insist that deconstructionism is bad philosophy.

[Jeff G]

Responding to CJMR

Intellectually yes, they should be. But journalists are part of a business, and businesses are driven by profit. You can't make money if you alienate half of your possible customers.
Of course that's also our fault. If we weren't driving "profit now"( just look at Enron, MCI, etc.) in lieu of qualitative success, then we wouldn't have that problem either.

[Rob Rodger]

"While we spent years trying to detect the prejudices hidden behind the appearance of objective statements, do we now have to reveal the objective and incontrovertible facts hidden behind the illusion of prejudices? "

I was always vaguely disturbed by the amount of relativism I was fed in school. This is in large part because I like definitive answers, but also because I suspected that if you teach that everyone's right in thier own way... someone might start believing it. I think American society has over taught relativism, and we are going to have to start teaching how to descern objective facts. What bothers me most is that we will likely over teach it and in another 60 years go through this again. Which reminds me that everyone should read the Fourth Turning which is all about this sort of thing.

[carla]

It's true that I finished graduate school, let's see, 11 years ago, but i got damned little relativism, and, in fact, mostly had to supply my own. Part of the problem, of course, is that for many things there aren't definitive answers--which is not the same thing, at all, as everyone somehow being right in his/her own way. One of the problems inherent in this subject is that too many claims or arguments get conflated, and sorting them out makes one (me) sound pedantic . . . alas, i still care about the subject, though, even though i'm no longer an academic.

[Matt McIrvin]

I majored in physics. In physics everyone tends to believe in the existence of an objective reality even if nobody can agree on precisely what it is.

[Nancy Lebovitz]

Jeff G, of course you can make money by alienating half "your" customers if there's a sufficiently large base of people who either like being pissed off or who like your point of view.

The country's still 50-50 on the election--this doesn't mean Fox is going broke by only playing to the right. 50%, even 50% of the US that cares about news, is still a pretty big market.

[carla]

Actually, Matt, I think there's reality, too--or, rather, realities. I really think that where people disagree is on where the disagreement is. This is non-trivial, of course, just as the disagreements in your field are non-trivial, but I also don't think that a single true immediately apprehensible world is going to suddenly appear, or be discovered; all we can do is muddle along. You would like Wittgenstein, I suspect . . .