[by François Rastier]
Nothing in the world is more dangerous
than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Martin Luther King
Passing as an advisor to Vladimir Putin, the Eurasianist philosopher Alexander Dugin once declared that Russia had the duty to invade Europe. He added: "Postmodernity shows that every so-called truth is a matter of belief. So we believe in what we do, we believe in what we say. And this is the only way to define truth. So we have our specific Russian truth and you have to accept it."[1].
The deconstruction that characterizes postmodernity is not limited to university philosophy or literature departments. A hypercritical movement, it weakens academic disciplines from within; a relativist, it seduces the authorities by justifying arbitrariness. It calls for generalized deregulation and in fact legitimizes various political and economic interests.
Despite its claims to critical thinking, deconstruction attacks the very notion of fact, rejects the work of objectification specific to science, in short delegitimizes the exercise of rationality, the main foundation of critical thinking, destroys it in order to replace it. From then on, the simple objectivity of facts and even more so scientific truth seem unbearably normative.
By allowing us to recognize a reality independent of the prejudices or "world views" of some and others, truth is a common good. As such, recognizing it seems to undermine private interests. When the merchants of doubt prosper, when lobbyists outnumber MPs ten to one, established facts can be counterbalanced by a host of studies produced by the industrial sector.
Moreover, the concept of truth does not only concern the domain of knowledge, but also that of ethics: in the final analysis, truth is an ethical notion, because it allows the recognition of the common world; hence the hostility that totalitarian regimes have towards it - and Gramsci's affirmation that only truth is revolutionary.
The Rise of Deconstruction in Philosophy
In 1933, Heidegger, then a Nazi rector and still considered today as the greatest philosopher of his century, defined "the Essence of Truth" by the worldview of the German people. In accordance with this communitarian definition, he also formulated the project of the overthrow (reduction ou Destruction) of philosophy. This project of destruction was explicitly taken up by Derrida, and, under the euphemistic name of "deconstruction", it has enjoyed international success for more than half a century. In the intersectional studies that claim to be part of it[2], the identity conception of truth remains, with each gender or racial community defining its own.
It is about attacking the very notion of truth in favor of a relativism of experience, against the scientific enterprise in general, on the grounds that "science does not think," as Heidegger said. It is also about weakening scientific regulation from within, a program that we see applied every day in our disciplines.
Thus the truth would be the expression of a will to power in accordance with a collective vision of the world, embodied by a power. Taking up Michel Foucault's gesture, Jean-François Lyotard thus subordinates, in The Postmodern Condition (1979), knowledge in power, to define truth as what a power imposes: "who decides what knowledge is and who knows what should be decided". Science is then reduced to the "right to decide what is true" (p. 20) - even though truth is an obstacle to power and is freed in principle from individual or community opinions, imposed or not. This is a purely theoretical cynical of truth, which reduces thought to a simple eristic, as Schopenhauer once did in his The art of always being right.
In the name of postmodernism, deconstructive thought thus delegitimizes the very concept of truth and spreads a generalized relativism that goes beyond the cultural domain to reject the sciences. Reality itself is then nothing more than a "vision of the world" that varies according to pleasure and interests. Better still, the refusal of scientific truth may appear as a legitimate resistance to Power. Certainty becomes the only criterion of knowledge and the Cartesian maxim Cogito ergo sum becomes: “I believe therefore it is true”.
It is as if the goal of deconstruction was to get rid of any regime of proof and even conjecture, which subsequently allowed the imposition of an alternative militant truth. This results from an attack on the very notion of fact; there are only interpretations without number and without hierarchy that only authorize themselves and that cannot be hierarchized. From then on, the lie is nothing more than the statement of an alternative truth guaranteed by the liar himself.
This is not a simple skepticism, but the institution and legitimization of the most diverse fanaticisms. Complementarily, when Michel Foucault and his supporters claimed adisciplinarity, that is to say the absence of intradisciplinary regulation, this has made it possible to suspend the methodological standards which allow the disciplines to produce their field of objectification.
The same is true, moreover, for the transdisciplinary claim of certain concepts. For example, light has been “decolonized” at McGill University, and Cornell University now offers an astronomy course entitled: “Black Holes: Race and the Cosmos”, which intends to answer this guiding question: “Is there a connection between the cosmos and the idea of racial blackness? ».
We see that a transdisciplinary concept like the decolonization or gender, etc., can be applied absolutely to all disciplines, simply because these concepts are metaphysical, by definition, since they are beyond all fields of objectification. Hence the fervent, even devout, character of their use.
Convergence of interests
Along the way, deconstruction will have legitimized both the scientific post-truth and the political post-truth of activism. Its hypercritical skepticism then reverses into an assumed dogmatism that accommodates perfectly the political strategies of confusion. The absolute relativity of categories culminates in their reversibility, or even, if necessary, in their indistinctness. It has led, for example, to rejecting human rights as a universalist lure — and yet Western.
For a long time, demagogy has invoked "common sense" against established facts. Lying remains in common use, but it remains dependent on a regime of truth. With what Harry Frankfurt calls the bullshit, which is unofficially translated as bullshit, another regime of discourse has taken over: in accordance with a policy of information flow, all reality is drowned in an indiscernible mixture. Sowing a general doubt, a confusion strategy then allows for evasion: "The computer age in general means that we no longer know very well what is happening," Trump said at the beginning of the "Russian affair" (Reuters, December 28, 2016). From then on, the president was able to denounce fakes on a daily basis[3], in tweets that millions of followers read as if they were addressed to them personally.
Masterfully illustrating the strategy of confusion, after the attempted poisoning of Sergei Skripal by two GRU agents, various Russian officials and media outlets gave the press 2018 different versions between March and April 26, thus illustrating the relieved observation of Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov: "it is difficult to disentangle truth from falsehood."[4]. A big step forward will thus have been taken since the traditional state lie, when for example the USSR blamed the Katyn massacre on the Nazis: it is no longer a question of disinforming, as in the days of the Cold War, but of discrediting the very notion of information. In addition, the confusion is maintained by a systematic rejection of the media and of all those who would claim to stick to established facts. Thus thickens this disorientation that Clausewitz called the "fog of war" - and which now envelops hybrid war.
With the invocation of "alternative facts", a new situation has been established by the convergence of various factors. Various forms of negationism, historical, social, climatic and environmental, can thus be legitimized by political authorities, but also scientific and intellectual, as soon as the denial takes the elaborate form of a systematic confusion where proven facts become indistinguishable.
The economic stakes are obvious. A Bambara adage reminds us that the donut seller never says that they are cold. With managerial ideology, incomplete or biased information becomes systematic concealment and widespread fraud, both fiscal and social.
This concealment is itself veiled by the highlighting of "societal" issues which create a diversion: in fact, the bureaucratic influence of management relies on the compassionate pretexts of political correctness to multiply divisions and promotes a generalized social control of words and actions.
Science and inclusive management
Now disseminated by all teaching and research organizations as well as by funding agencies, managerial ideology encourages each researcher to become their own communicator, or even their own media. The pressure does not only lead to the multiplication of ghost authors for the slightest paper, but also to embellishing or even inventing results. The example comes from above, and Claude Allègre, president of the Fondation Écologie d'avenir and former Minister of Education and Research, has multiplied climate-sceptic writings by deliberately rigging data[5]. Even a CNRS President was recently dismissed for fraud.
Due to the current race for "excellence", the most popular journals have never been forced to withdraw so many articles. Scientific fraud has become commonplace over several decades and is experiencing a well-documented boom (see in particular Retraction Watch).
Richard Horton, Director of The Lancet, estimating that half of scientific studies could be false (No. 385, April 11, 2015). The number of articles withdrawn increased tenfold between 10 and 1975. Since the start of the pandemic, 2012 articles on Covid have been withdrawn (including a hoax published with flying colors). In this confusion, the server Problematic Paper Screener, an automatic scanner for scientific fraud, has identified in six months 14.774 publications suspected of being plagiarisms of all or part of studies already published (The echoes, January 17, 2022).
Finally, the collapse of the scientific spirit is not only legitimized by deconstruction, but it is also encouraged by the supervisory authorities that implement the principles of management: biased calls for tenders, on societal subjects, produced and evaluated by "experts". We see this in European research projects on racism, which give a large place to "Islamophobia", as if the criticism of Islam were that of a race. Obliged to respond to them in order to obtain minimal funding, the laboratories behave as subcontractors and present the expected results, even if it means biasing them to protect the future.
When making political decisions, validated scientific publications are often weighed against studies produced by industry, whose data often remain protected by trade secrets, which shields them from possible criticism. Of course, not all studies produced by industry are suspect, but their results may not be published, in order to protect the future: leaks of documents, such as Tobacco Papers or Monsanto Papers, attest to this[6]. On the other hand, churning out inconclusive studies remains a tried and tested way to add to confusion and sow doubt. After the first subpoenas, the American tobacco industry overwhelmed the judges with 80 million pages of documents, which delayed the investigations.
Furthermore, due to the lack of sustainable funding, what is not funded by managerial bureaucracy is not the subject of research and falls into the domain of "undone science". Albert Fert recently received the Nobel Prize for having highlighted, in a thesis on fundamental physics, the phenomena that have enabled the production of electronic memories that are now ubiquitous; however, he believes that his thesis would not be funded at present.
In addition, the rate of replicable experiments is decreasing, or even becoming a minority in some disciplines, so that gray areas are expanding with suspicions of fraud. In other disciplines, one can no longer publish an experiment that fails, while this kind of failure allows precisely to invalidate erroneous theories.
In the humanities and social sciences, hoaxes are becoming increasingly easy: while Alan Sokal once published in Social Text An elaborate fake stuffed with accurate references, Helen Pluckrose and her colleagues simply had to string together a string of grotesque jargon keywords to publish a series of articles in intersectional journals with flying colors. One of the authors, Peter Boghossian, has since been forced to resign from his post after publishing in Cogent Social Sciences, “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct” where he demonstrated that penises are social constructs responsible for climate change.
In France, Benedetta Tripodi, a non-existent author, has published without difficulty in the Badiou Studies a text entitled: “Ontology, Neutrality and the Strive for (non)Being-Queer” (downloadable here: 100-337-1-PB) without the person concerned, a prominent member of the editorial board, noticing anything. The sociologist Michel Maffesoli, who one might have thought to be clairvoyant after having supervised the astrology thesis of the fortune teller Élisabeth Teissier, had for his part published in the journal he directs, Mediations, a deconstructive hoax, “Postmodern Automobilities”[7]Complacency does not explain everything: in important academic sectors, the evaluation and verification of alleged facts no longer have any criterion value, and the principle of good pleasure fits perfectly with post-truth.
Finally, it should be remembered that managerial pressure and militant pressure have harmoniously combined in international criteria, such as those of European research, which subordinate all funding, in whatever discipline, to criteria of inclusiveness.
In short, everything happens as if deconstructive relativism transposed into the intellectual world the generalized deregulation in the economic and social world. Thus a generalized deregulation : deregulation economic, deregulation policy which leads to a state of exception; and finally, legitimizing the first two, deregulation epistemic which affects science and all areas of knowledge, thus promoting the fog of war.
