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.)