You are, of course, spot on.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that poststructualism etc created the phenomenon, but it is certainly true that the erosion of evidence based debate is something that helps the powerful and the cunning. The invasion of public debate by public relations tactics, in which ten bad arguments are deemed more convincing than one good one, helps those who employ PR companies, not the individual.

“…The Zambian government’s use of starvation as a political weapon against refugees”? Don’t you mean the Zimbabwean government?

Hi Gag,

No, I meant Zambia. In 2002, Zambia refused to allow food from the US into the country in the middle of a crop failure on the grounds that the food was GM. After consulting a number of Western anti-GM environment groups, the Zambian government declared that the GM food supply was (i) not proven to be safe to eat (and therefore took it upon themselves to protect people’s health by starving them to death), and (ii) might contaminate existing Zambian crops that were GM-free (despite the fact that the food was already milled and therefore could not possibly cross-fertilise anything). The politics was complex, but essentially the Zambian government was after an excuse to starve refugees out of their camps. And the useful idiots at the Guardian gave this crime their full support.

What is happening in Zimbabwe is also reprehensible and also involves starvation as a political weapon, but there are significant differences. One could claim there is some blame here for the anti-rational humanities as they have provided Mugabe and Mbeki with a steady stream of post-colonialist justifications for their actions.

I would like to make it clear that, much as I despise those who have provided moral support for Mugabe and Mwanawasa (President of Zambia), the responsibility for their villainy remains with the criminals themselves. That is to say, Mugabe and Mwanawasa are mass murderers. Those who have helped them can be considered accessories both before and after the fact; this is contemptible, but still it takes a Mugabe or a Mwanawasa for there to be crimes to accessorise.

‘While it is impossible to say how much French theory directly contributed to any of these disasters,’

Is it possible to provide any evidence that it contributed anything to any of them? Seeing as you’re such a fan of evidence, and all. Or did I just miss the newspaper reports of heavily annotated copies of ‘Of Grammatology’ in Kaunda’s Presidential Palace by not looking carefully enough…

If anyone painted with this broad a brush in criticism of writiers on any subject you knew much about you’d rightly be outraged. Get some nuance, and you might find that you can actually engage in sensible dialogue about this kind of thing, instead of just preaching to the choir.

Dear M. Barebones,

Allow me to reiterate my argument.

1. According to Cusset, one of the defining features of French Theory is that certainty favours the powerful while doubt favours the powerless.

2. This is incorrect, as numerous examples attest.

3. It is impossible to know how much French theory influenced these particular examples.

It seems to me that you object to point 1 on the grounds that it is too broad a brush to describe French Theory. If this is so, then perhaps you ought to take your objection to Cusset too, as this is a direct and unambiguous quotation from his work. You might also like to object to Rolando Pérez’s 2005 essay in Borderlands (not the Australian one). Check out paragraph eight. I also note that Stanley Fish’s glowing review of Cusset’s book seems content to go along with Cusset’s assertion. I think, then, that if you are going to criticise me for a simplistic view of French Theory, you had better explain why three prominent supporters of French Theory describe it with exactly the same simplification. If I have missed some nuance, I would be pleased to change my mind if you could please point out to me one example of a French Theorist who (i) championed rationalism and scientific method as a superior way of describing the world compared to anti-rational, anti-scientific ways, or (ii) argued against the claim that uncertainty empowers the powerless.

You also seem to object to point 3. But I don’t see what you are objecting to. I said quite clearly that it is impossible to know how much French Theory influenced these events. I repeat: impossible to know. And the reason I said this is precisely because it is difficult to know what sort of evidence would suffice to answer the question. Your example of media reports of a heavily annotated book in a Zambian Presidential Palace would not answer the question (and it was Mwanawasa, by the way, not Kaunda, who presided over the famine I referred to). The media, as far as I am aware, did not report on any of the books in any palace libraries. Nor can I imagine that they would. And even if they did report such a book, it would not help. My own library contains many books I dislike and find disagreeable; where such books have been marked or annotated by myself it is usually to remind me of where to look for the clinching arguments against the authors.

And yet I think it would be naive to think that French Theory had absolutely no political ramifications whatsoever. It has been the dominant school of thought in Western humanities for decades. Many of the French Theorists were explicit about their desire to influence politics (what else does “speaking truth to power” mean?). How well the theorists succeeded is hard to know. Certainly some of the my examples would have been utterly unchanged if French Theory had never existed (the tobacco industry, for instance), but others (such as the Zambian famine) were supported by people in the West using arguments that bore a strong resemblance to the anti-rational arguments that first came out of post-structuralism and which are still celebrated by Cusset, Fish, Pérez, and many others (I’d almost add Žižek here, but I’ve decided he’s taken contrarianism to previously unknown heights by dismissing his own arguments at every opportunity).

However, just because the arguments used to support the Zambian starvation bore resemblance to certain French Theory arguments does not mean that one is responsible for the other. Even if Mwanawasa had announced in public that his policy was based on his reading of Derrida or Saussure, it is still highly likely that this would be a post-hoc justification; that is, that he had found a book that he could use to give credence to what he had already decided to do anyway (just as it is now incontrovertible that George W. Bush and his team decided to invade Iraq and then went looking for reasons to justify themselves). And that is why I said it was impossible to quantify the influence of French Theory.

You seem to object to that and want the answer to be that French Theory had no influence whatsoever on any bad thing that ever happened. In this regard, and please correct me if I am wrong, you are in agreement with Fish and Cusset. As Fish put it, “For both [supporters and detractors] what was important about French theory in America was its political implications, and one of Cusset’s main contentions — and here I completely agree with him — is that it doesn’t have any.”

To Fish, the virtue of French Theory is that it exposes the fact that “the relationship between what is either celebrated or deplored will be rhetorical, not logical.” Fish and Cusset might believe that this has no political ramifications but I couldn’t disagree more. If there is a lesson to be learned from the rise of creationism, the emergence of anti-vaccine groups, and the fractured logic of Zambian starvation programs, it is that in politics, rhetoric is more powerful than logic.

But my point was not to blame French Theory for those scandals. Which is why I pointed out that there was no way of knowing how to quantify such blame. What I was saying was that French Theory celebrates the lines of thought that allow these scandals to flourish and, whether causally responsible or not, deserves to be oppugned.

Hi Chris, how are ya?

I gotta admit, I think you’re employing some questionable rhetorical strategies of your own by taking one line from one article and using it to justify the denigration of an entire and complex branch of knowledge.

Much like any other field, so-called French theory is not a homogenous body of work, and it’s full of debate and disagreement and contested meanings. And yes, much like any field, there are abuses that are made of it, but this does not mean the whole can be dismissed so easily.

I disagree with your claim that French theory aids the powerful, because in my experience of it, and to the extent that the powerful give a fuck about philosophy, it does the opposite — it calls into question the power relations that appear as the natural order.

The whole point of the notion of the social construction of meaning is to expose those irrational power structures that are unconsciously replicated through linguistic and institutional practices.

I’d suggest that the kind of uncertainty that negatively affects human health and well-being comes less from the influence of poststructuralism, and precisely from the effects of the power dynamics that poststructuralism seeks to expose.

Foucault would probably have been surprised to hear the contention that French theory has no political implications while he was protesting on behalf of prisoners in the 1970s. He would also have been surprised to hear that he was part of a movement that preferred uncertainty over truth, as he was working to have the actual conditions inside the prisons documented and made a matter of public record.

Personally, I believe in truth and the value of empiricism, but what I learned from poststructuralism is that they are mediated by language and institutions and this has to be taken into account in any political understanding of the world.

Hi, Andrew. How you?

I would agree with you that it’s unfair to criticise French Theory based on just one quote. But you know, it’s not just one quote. It’s a consistent pattern throughout all of French Theory that happens to be summed up by one quote. In the comments, I pointed to the fact that Fish didn’t object to this, and another pro-French Theory writer endorsed exactly the same position. You can find the same sentiments in Derrida, Lacan, Latour, and on and on.

You put forward Foucault as a counter-example, but there are two things to be said about this. One is that Foucault expressly denied that his work was postmodernist or poststructural. It was his own “je ne suis pas Marxiste” moment. Although, of course, Foucault was something of a contrarian and would probably reject any label that was applied to him. So I’ll put aside Foucault’s personal rejection of the label and move to the second point. Foucault, when trying to be politically active, did everything he could to bring empirical evidence to the public. One has to wonder why the major French Theorists would spend so much intellectual effort undermining empiricism if one of their own heroes used it as a political tool when it really counted.

The thing is there are many of these kinds of examples.

Derrida, for instance, was consistently misrepresented in numerous controversies, and argued at one point for the importance of accurate representation in journalism. And others, including Latour, have contended that the question of the social construction of science and the question of its empirical truth are two different things (a simplistic and obsolete binary in itself).

This yields a more nuanced picture of a complex field that, though it certainly does explore themes of undecidability, indeterminacy and the like, is nowhere near as monolithic as you suggest.

Cusset’s statement (which seems an admittedly simplistic attempt at an enthusiastic conclusion, and in fact runs counter to his complaint, earlier in the essay, against ‘mistaking theorists for what they clearly denounced: the promotion of relativism, of fluctuating and nonreferential values’), its lack of challenge by Fish, and endorsement by another, is hardly overwhelming evidence of a consistent pattern.

I’d agree with you that in cases where doubt serves the interests of power, empirical evidence is a necessary political strategy. But there are also cases where the authority of a supposedly self-evident truth serves the dominant interests, and here strategies of doubt are one form of resistance. And different kinds of French theory have tools of analysis that can call those power structures into question.

Against the Cusset quote, you propose an opposite theory of the relationship between power and doubt, but to me this can only obscure those situations where the powerful claim the voice of truth — scientific objectivity, religious dogma, CIA intelligence, etc. — to further their own interests.

Andy, if you want more examples suggesting a consistent pattern of anti-rationalism, consider the fact that the same objections I raised have been echoed by Alan Sokal, Noam Chomsky, Carl Sagan, Thomas Kuhn, William Quine, and John Searle. These objections led to the next generation of French philosophers such as Levy and Glucksmann to reject French Theory altogether. Now all these people may be wrong or unfairly critical of French Theory — I’m more than happy to entertain the possibility — but it’s certainly not just me and a handful of curmudgeonly critics.

What’s more, and perhaps even more tellingly, the pattern is identified even by supporters and sympathetic commentators of poststructuralism. Consider Lohn Lye’s English course description of poststructuralism, which claims that one of the central points of poststructuralism is “the idea that we think in terms of certain tropes, and construct meaning in terms of genres, so that meaning is pre-channeled in certain typified, identifiable ways, which ways reveal more about their construction of meaning than about any ‘reality’ beyond the rhetorical constructs.” (My emphasis.) You can go through book after book on poststructuralism and find the same sentiment.

Now Derrida is an interesting case. As you say, he complained bitterly about how he was represented by others. But, you know, I find it interesting that when Derrida was awarded an honorary degree by Cambridge, its philosophy faculty rose up in protest. Co-signatories to the Cambridge letter of protest included William Quine, himself widely regarded as having been instrumental to post-structuralism and hardly a fusty old conservative philosopher. And it’s not just them. Consider this famous description of Derrida as an obscurantist terrorist. “He writes so obscurely you can’t tell what he’s saying, that’s the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, ‘You didn’t understand me; you’re an idiot.’ That’s the terrorism part.” Now this is, of course, something of an overreaction (terrorist indeed!), but this statement was made by Michel Foucault. Even other French Theorists were highly critical of Derrida. While we’re on Foucault, it is worth pointing out that for all his attempt to bring the plight of prisoners to the attention of the public with empirical evidence, his own scholarship on the history of prisons was woeful. He made numerous statements of fact that were flat-out wrong and were known to be wrong at the time he wrote them and would have been known to him if he had done a proper job of researching his book.

The lesson I draw from this is that poststructuralists like Derrida and Foucault are all in favour of empirical evidence about things that matter to them, but reject its authority on all other occasions. (And with Derrida I believe this was a deliberate tactic in order that he could claim to be misunderstood.)

I think you’ve made an excellent point that power groups usually claim the voice of truth. I agree entirely. But, you know, sometimes power groups have the right to claim the weight of evidence. When the NHMRC advises vaccination, the fact that it is a powerful government institution does nothing to diminish the evidence behind its decisions. On the other hand, when Catholic bishops tell people that condoms don’t protect against HIV/AIDS, they are claiming the weight of evidence without actually having the benefit of such. So what to do? Well, my response is to look more carefully at the evidence, to check the original documentation or papers, and to look for flaws, biases, confounders, and points of non-applicability, and then to ask what evidence would allow us to overcome these flaws, biases, etc. If you take the poststructuralist route, the response is to undermine the authority of empirical evidence by calling it a social construct or a privileged narrative. This does indeed undermine Catholic duplicity about condoms and HIV but it also undermines the NHMRC’s advice on vaccination. It’s one thing to recognise and try to understand the social and cultural factors that influence our state of knowledge — including scientific knowledge — it’s another to reject it altogether or to diminish it to the point that it is effectively rejected.

And while you will probably claim that this is another over-reaction and that poststructuralism does not reject empirical knowledge, my experience is that most definitely does. While poststructuralists don’t deny external reality (they’re not solipsists), they do deny that we can come to any effective understanding of it. Derrida’s famous “il n’y a pas de hors-text” is a perfect example. In fact, we can look outside the text. The very purpose of empirical knowledge is to look outside the text and see how the universe answers a question. Derrida was half-right: we can only know things through the agency of our own thoughts and perceptions, but he was wrong to diminish the importance of empiricism (as he did in his “What is Deconstruction?” interview with Kristeva) as a way of improving the agency of our thoughts and perceptions. Derrida preferred to present the entire edifice of science as a kind of useful parlour game that needed his own (naturally) undefinable process of grammatology to be of any further value.

And not only in theory, but in practical examples. I can give some examples, including some from my personal experience if you like. On the political ramifications of French Theory, allow me to close with a quote from Noam Chomsky talking specifically about the effect of French Theory.

“There has been a striking change in the behavior of the intellectual class in recent years. The left intellectuals who 60 years ago would have been teaching in working class schools, writing books like ‘mathematics for the millions’ (which made mathematics intelligible to millions of people), participating in and speaking for popular organizations, etc., are now largely disengaged from such activities, and although quick to tell us that they are far more radical than thou, are not to be found, it seems, when there is such an obvious and growing need and even explicit request for the work they could do out there in the world of people with live problems and concerns. That’s not a small problem. This country, right now, is in a very strange and ominous state. People are frightened, angry, disillusioned, skeptical, confused. That’s an organizer’s dream, as I once heard Mike say. It’s also fertile ground for demagogues and fanatics, who can (and in fact already do) rally substantial popular support with messages that are not unfamiliar from their predecessors in somewhat similar circumstances. We know where it has led in the past; it could again. There’s a huge gap that once was at least partially filled by left intellectuals willing to engage with the general public and their problems. It has ominous implications, in my opinion.”

That was written in 1995.

Can’t begin to tell you how powerfully this entry resonated with me. I have always believed that the assault on empiricism has its origin with otherwise clever people who simply can’t do math.