84. Postmodern Disturbance

Richard Butrick, Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, has just sent me a reminder of what most disturbed our declining years at Ohio University. It was the claim that “there are no facts, only interpretation.” Nietzsche made it and postmodern theorists rubbed it in. Jacques Derrida: "Words appeal not to facts but to other words." Michel Foucault: "What we call truth is only the expression of dominant power relations that control the cultural semiotic." E. H. Carr: "History is a hard core of interpretation surrounded by a pulp of disputable facts.”

It was terrible being told at the end of your career that there was "no such thing as truth." What were scientists searching for? What was the use of their method? What the hell were we (and so many commencement speakers) doing sending graduates out into the world to war against falsehood?

I think our disturbance was understandable, as is that of David Solway, the author of the piece Professor Butrick sent me (The Weakness of the West, pajamasmedia.com ). The shaking we felt was down in the foundations. Below the scientific method was the Socratic method, the questioning, the answering, the testing, the making sure. Below that was every step-by-step procedure human beings had struggled to work out. There wasn't one that didn't require confidence in the preceding step, it's "truth." At the bottom, it seemed, was rationality itself. And all was shaking.

However, the tremors were not as great as we thought they were and we were more disturbed than we needed to be. It wasn't the foundation that was shaking, it was the language. Let's say Butrick, Solway, and I are boarding an airplane for San Francisco with the scariest postmodernist of all, Michel Foucault. We all want to get there alive. The pilot tells us to turn our electronic devices off — an "expression of a dominant power relation" if I ever heard one. What is Foucault doing? Turning off his iPad with the rest of us. Why? Because Monday he saw the same NBC program I saw. A team of scientists, after a five-year study, had determined that there is, indeed, some risk of interference with airplane function during take-off and landing. Foucault, in the world that is not just a world of human power relations, doesn't want his chance of living to be any lower than that of the rest of us. He wants the scientific method to work. He pushes the button and certifies it.

Which tells me that Foucault didn't really believe those statements that shook us up. And Derrida didn't believe his. Is Derrida going to hear the pilot's words appealing "not to facts but to other words"? Not in the world where he, like the rest of us, wants to live.

Yet Foucault and Derrida sounded as if they believed those shocking things. They were "serious as a heart attack," somebody said. Well, I think they were serious, but about different things. They were serious about psychology (psychoanalysis) and politics, the things that were being taken most seriously by the people they were addressing at the time, French intellectuals. We were serious about words, the ordinary ones, the ones so often misused by the people we were addressing, students.

Well, they shared so much with their audience, they were held to so little by it, that they got careless with their words. When Foucault said, "Truth is only the expression of dominant power relations" he didn't mean only. He couldn't. He turned off his iPad. But he had a point to make in Paris so…. It was the same, I think, with Derrida.

So, Professor Butrick, let us enjoy our retirement in peace. You and I and Solway and Foucault and Derrida are all really on the same side.