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Bruno
Latour, Column for Domus January 2005
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-So, you must be a bit worried having helped Mr Bush win the election?
-What? Why? How could I have helped him? I am a philosopher. I am
on the other side of the Atlantic; on the other side of the political
spectrum.
-I’m not so sure. After all you are a constructivist, aren't
you? At least you provided those folks some of the tools to escape
all the limits of decency.
-Constructivism is a virtue, it's what allows one to fight fundamentalism,
fanaticism. How could Bush be a constructivist?
-Well, this is what is written here, which by now has become a famous
phrase: “The aide [to President Bush] said that guys like
me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community’
which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge
from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ The aid
[said]: ‘That's not the way the world really works anymore,
we're an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality.’”[1]
-Amazing! Those guys have been reinventing Andersen's story of the
Emperor’s New Clothes, except... [2]
-Except they are ridiculing the little kid who screams, “But
he has nothing on at all!” Now they scream back: “Quite
right kid!” Is this not something?
- How dare you!
- But is this not exactly what you have been saying: “Reality
is made up. It's the result of a performative speech act.”
“Reality is gone, it's passé”, it's good for
us poor guys stuck in the “reality-based community”.
-I am dumbfounded. You twist everything. We have never said that.
It's not our way.
-Ah hah! Mr Viktor Frankenstein, you don't recognize your progeny
and yet there is your trademark everywhere: “Made in the United
Campus of Postmodernism.” Social constructivism it is indeed!
Perhaps it has migrated from the Left to the Right, but it belongs
to you. I am afraid you have given weapons to your enemies.
- How can you dare make this connection between the critique of
naturalism and the imperial discourse of the nitwits?
-No nitwits are they. You don’t want to underestimate them.
It’s a clever trick turned upside down. You are the ones who
have said that reality paid no role in the making of our representations
of it. Once contact with reality is severed, there is no turning
back. Self-reference is sufficient, provided you are strong enough.
People bothered by reality have understood you very well. Read Ian
Hacking:[3] you social scientists
have been criticizing reality so much that everything ended up being
socially constructed. Well now you have it.
-But this is libellous. We never said that. Power is not enough.
-Really? We always said social constructivism was dangerous, reactionary
even. We were shouted back with the adjective “modernist”
as if it was a term of abuse.
-But no, you are mixing everything. You are confusing it with social
constructivism. You are...
-And now you are left whining about the victory of Forrest Gump
Imperator.
-Oh shut up. What are you gloating about? I did nothing. We are
in the same camp. How would sticking to modernism have helped?
-Facts, my dear, facts, that's the only sure anchor of the “reality-based
community”. If you begin to throw doubt on the solidity of
facts, if you begin to say they are “constructed”, or
worse “socially constructed”, then it opens up to all
kinds of abuses. You deprive the underdogs of any lever against
imperial clout: “It's like that because I say it is.”
Haven’t you bothered us enough with your knowledge/power?
Well now you have it: power makes knowledge. Indeed. Those guys
deny all the facts: weapons of mass destruction, global warming,
cancer caused by cigarettes.[4]
They can get away with everything. Empire makes reality. Decency
is gone. You strangled the little kid who could have screamed: “The
Emperor is naked!”
-I what? I am a criminal? So you want to go back to hard indisputable
facts? To forget about all the complicated conditions that made
them possible: culture, money, people, instruments, controversies.
-Don't bring controversies into it, that's just what the White House’s
fanatics always overemphasize; that's just their great argument
to do nothing on global warming, to deny the existence of evolution.
“Experts don’t agree, so it's not certain.” But
we have enough facts to be certain. Closure. Enough bickering and
dithering.
-But see, this is why you modernists are so incoherent, you speak
just like Mr Powell, the arch-liar: “Those are facts my friends,
not mere assertions.” Well in the end there were not even
assertions, but rather lies.
-How dare you use the word “lie”? For postmodernists
there is no truth anyway, no fact, just assertions.
-Gosh, this election really riled you up, didn't it? Don't you see
that I also pertain to the “reality-based community”?
I am as much against mere conviction as you are, if not more so.
-Conviction? But this is just what postmodernism has made impossible
to hold.
-Quite right and good riddance I say. Have you noticed how during
the last American election people came to use “I am convinced”
as if it was an intransitive verb? They never say by what sort of
evidence they were convinced. Just that they were intimately convinced.
-But you are the ones who deny the use of evidence! This is why
I am so enraged at postmodernism now that it lords over the White
House as much as over campuses.
-But evidences are always disputed, slow and hard and expensive
to come by, they need instruments, mediations. They are tentative,
multiple…
-“Mediations”, “multiplicity”, “interpretations”!
This is exactly what has killed common sense, and what makes it
impossible to stick to undisputable facts.
-Facts are disputable. Evidences are incomplete. This is what the
“reality-based community” has to live with.
-You have to have a way to mark the end.
-Yes, but you will never restore the privileges of modernism. You
will have to go through disputable evidences all the way to the
bitter end. No little child will ever see through the maze of self-referential
loops.
-You killed the little child.
-You are a little child.
_____________
[1]
Bob Herbert, “For Bush, real life just gets in the way”
International Herald Tribune 23-10-04
[2] Hans Christian Andersen's
The Emperor's New Clothes, first published in 1837
[3]
Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? Harvard University
Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1999
[4]
“Scientific Integrity in Policymaking: An Investigation into
the Bush Administration's Misuse of Science”, report by the
Union of Concerned Scientists, February 2004.
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