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| Pix Credit here (Fernand Léger Set design for Le Création du Monde, music by Darius Milhaud, 1923) |
What moves us to believe is not the fact that revealed truths appear as true and intelligible in the light of our natural reason: we believe "because of the authority of God himself who reveals them, who can neither deceive nor be deceived". So "that the submission of our faith might nevertheless be in accordance with reason, God willed that external proofs of his Revelation should be joined to the internal helps of the Holy Spirit." Catechism of the Catholic Church, Pat. I, The Profession of Faith, Section I ("I believe"-"We Believe") Chp. 3 (Man's Response to God), Para. 156
It is easy enough to get bored as one watches the transformation of global cognitive cages, each, in accordance with its own national or "special" characteristics. The present stage of that evolution is performative in the best possible sense: overacting by a set of archetypal characters (one cannot draw readers unless one plays to type, and to expectation) that produces not just absurdity, but also cartoon, the later not in its 17th century sense of carta (heavy paper used for sketching preliminary designs), but rather in its 19th century sense (and thus appropriately tied to the industrial age within which it still sits, though not for long) as comical or political drawing (it is not clear whether there ever was a distinction between the two terms, comical and political, in the sense of exogenous and endogenous public amusement derived from the Greek kōmōidia). And, of course, that performance is enhanced both by its own puffery and as well by the antics of the various claques who turn comedy, not into farce (low comedy stuffed into serious drama), but into orthodoxies which are pretended to be drawn from facts or critique, but which are essentially manifestations of belief with a diminished ethics of killing heretics and apostates.
Still, all of this, like much that passes for human entertainment, is built on and must conform to expectations that are both inherent in belief and demanded These expectations and beliefs are worth nothing unless they are performed; the totality of human collective cognition is built on the performance of belief. Belief here is realized as a sort of repetitive mimetic trope (one plated over and over again with slight differences) by the intended audience. That mimetic dialectic between the players/performances and the audience, mark the current intellectual and political/social spheres as much as it reflects on the mechanics that give form to forms of self-designated "entertainment" in its sense of public performances meant to amuse in its older sense of diverting attention, and perhaps to beguile, delude, or distract.
Belief creates its own reality. For many, over the course of the last several thousand years, this sub-textual understanding has helped frame approaches to the construction of religious institutions. There is something subliminally mystical about collective belief, especially in its ability to move the individual. Belief also produces text--Logos made concrete, the consequences of which are memorialized in culture, religion, and law. Belief-Faith-Law forms that solid triangle that frames the limits of the reality within which human organization is conceived and elaborated.
And yet to beguile, delude, or distract by reference to what? Perhaps by reference to the ideal around which belief is constructed and the amusement is performed. Or perhaps by reference to the cognitive cage that both defines the cognitive cage of belief and is defined by it. What is missing from all of this is truth, except as the manifestation of belief and its believability. Religion provides a clear pathway to the trope: "We shall now have a full definition of faith" Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, III.2.vii. The Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it differently,"Faith is first of all a personal adherence of man to God." Catechism of the Catholic Church, Pat. I, The Profession of Faith, Section I ("I believe"-"We Believe") Chp. 3 (Man's Response to God), Par. 150.
That, of course, is the problem of modernity. Having gotten a glimpse of ther world beyond their own, intellectuals could not resist mapping it in relation to the belief universe from which they emerged, and then political, economic, and cultural elites--as well as anyone with a bone to pick with their place in the believed order, turned that mapping into burlesque in its ancient sense of something odd, grotesque, ludicrous, and from a general perspective, a trifle not worth much--except as an instrument for the deconstruction of old belief systems, not to rid human collectives of belief and its ordering power, but to redirect it in the service of cognitive cages of belief more to their liking. Careers as public intellectuals were made form this, as well as lots of money and shifts of power. But that is the ordinary stuff of humanity. What is amusing, however, is the conviction that belief could be overcome by something more certain in and of itself; that truth is somehow not connected to truthfulness (understood in its ancient sense of faith, faithfulness, fidelity or loyal to something, from Old English triewð (West Saxon), treowð (Mercian)), and somehow embedded within objects signified as facts.
Apparently, I am not the only one who is amused. In a recent short essay in French (English and Spanish translations below) on "X", one boosted with its positive reposting by Elon Musk (writing, in an ironically profound way, given the subject of the essay: "La Vérité" or in colloquial English, "Truth"), authored by Brivael Le Pogam, who offered his "apologies, on behalf of the French, for giving birth to French Theory (which in turn gave birth to the worst of all ideological monstrosities: wokism)." (Le Pogam essay). The irony here is akin to that developed so well in the 19th century by Søren Kierkegaard in his The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates. Here one encounters irony as both a liberating force (allowing a critique of "inside" from "outside") and as one that, when it negates everything (pure irony) detaches its user from any connection with the possibilities of rationalizing the world around them in some meaningful form.
Le Pogam's thesis is straightforward: "We gave the world Descartes, Pascal, Tocqueville. And then, in the intellectual ruins of post-1968, we gave Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. Three brilliant men who forged, in the elegance of our language, the ideological weapon that today paralyzes the West." [Nous avons donné au monde Descartes,
Pascal, Tocqueville. Et puis, dans les ruines intellectuelles de l'après-68,
nous avons donné Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. Trois hommes brillants qui ont
fabriqué, dans l'élégance de notre langue, l'arme idéologique qui paralyse
aujourd'hui l'Occident.] (Le Pogam essay).
There are several threads here that are worth unraveling (without unraveling the argument itself). The first is the critical importance of 1968 for the formation and ultimately the self-destruction of the political-social culture that made both critique and its instrumentalization possible in the ways in which Le Pogam critiques in turn. But it was not just what became the liberal democratic intellectual left that emerged from 1968, so did those who found in its logic and its double meanings, a horror to be countered by all means possible. Among them a theologian at the University of Tübingen and then in Regensburg who as Cardinal Ratinger developed some of the most interesting post-modern critiques of the political agendas beneath the specifically targeted critiques of the post-modern academic ad political left.
The second is the opposition suggested between Descartes, Pascal, Tocqueville on the one hand, and Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze on the other. Between them, of course are Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, whose spectres were best ghosted after 1968. French post-modernism might be understood as a more enthusiastic student of phenomenology and semiotics (Husserl, Peirce, de Saussure, Barthes, etc.) shorn of much of an interest in systems theory and autopoiesis (e.g., Luhmann and Maturana/Varela, though understanding its utility sub rosa). And yet together, Descartes, Pascal, Tocqueville on the one hand, and Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze on the other describe the spectrum of the possibilities of the Enlightenment from its compassion to its brutality and programmatic deconstruction. Not by them, but by those who saw in all of the writings potent instruments the language of which could be signified in ways that served their political agendas without appearing to do other than expose and analyze. In the process they remained trapped in the time horizons of the Enlightenment, unable to rise beyond the limits of their own critiques or rationalizations to see what was emerging in the sociology and systems grounded in technology and virtual systems.
That produces the third strand--the corruption of critique, its irony, as an instrument of political, social, cultural projects. The corruption presented itself in the form of the insulation of those political/social/cultural projects from the forms of critique --derived from post-modernity--but inapplicable to the political/cultural/social project of post-modernity itself. That corruption, one that continues into the present (and thus sparks one element of Le Pogam's ironic critique), itself produces the greatest irony of the project that is the object of Le Pogam's scrutiny. That irony: that critique itself is founded on belief, that is on the faith in the premise of the facticity and thus the truth of the underlying political/social/cultural values that shape the cognitive cages within post-post-modernity constructs its own universe and the reality which gives it form.
Le Pogam explains what it was that was instrumentalized:
One must
understand what they did. Foucault taught that truth does not exist;
that there are only power relations disguised as knowledge. He taught
that science, reason, justice, the medical establishment, the school
system, the prison system, and sexuality—that *everything*—is merely a
performance of domination. Derrida taught that texts possess no stable
meaning; that every signifier is in constant flux; that every reading is
an act of betrayal; that "the author is dead" and the reader reigns
supreme. Deleuze taught that one should favor the rhizome over the tree,
the nomad over the sedentary, desire over law, "becoming" over "being,"
and difference over identity. [Il faut comprendre ce qu'ils ont
fait. Foucault a enseigné que la vérité n'existe pas, qu'il n'y a que des
rapports de pouvoir déguisés en savoir. Que la science, la raison, la justice,
l'institution médicale, l'école, la prison, la sexualité, tout n'est qu'une
mise en scène de la domination. Derrida a enseigné que les textes n'ont pas de
sens stable, que tout signifiant glisse, que toute lecture est une trahison,
que l'auteur est mort et que le lecteur règne. Deleuze a enseigné qu'il fallait
préférer le rhizome à l'arbre, le nomade au sédentaire, le désir à la loi, le
devenir à l'être, la différence à l'identité.] (Le Pogam essay)
Le Pogam is engaging in a necessary reductionsim that strips nuance, but the reduction is not incorrect as such. Foucault did focus on the centrality of power relations; Derrida did focus on the instability of signification in language and the performance of meaning (though not with the sensibilities of semiotics); and Deleuze did indulge in the fracturing of the collective self and the possibilities of subterranean consciousness that itself produced a collective but one that rejected the basis of the premises and forms of organized self contained systems (in this sense he might be understood as not just an anti- but a counter-systems theorist). Nonbe of this, in itself takes theory or its consequences in any particular direction.And each supplies another piece in a long and varied conversation about the foundations of social--collective--ordering. Together they remind one--again--of the critical role of faith, of belief--in the construction, and de-construction of social (collective) systems in whatever functionally differentiated form amuses the theorist to consider. Each is a prayer--not just an entreaty (Latin orare/precari, or Greek Deēsis (δέησις)--but an adoratio, a set of specific acts of worship or adoration built around the presumptions that domination, signification, and collectivity is each made possible only through collective selection, and thus belief in its ordering premises are both essential and must be the subject of critique (as dialectic, as a Nietzschean process of revaluation of values, or as some sort of self-aware collective quality control). And all of this in the shadow of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard; the former for his exposure of the connection between belief and reality, and the later for his irony. Underlying it all, of course is not truth (that is the corrupting influence of the post post-modern, or its degeneration into "deconstruction" and its progeny), but belief in or a faith built on the belief in the truth of the founding premises of a rational order.
The problem, then, is not necessarily the content of French post-modernism, as such. It is the manner in which those who cam after might have chosen to use this--as a project of aggregated vulgarization ("when combined, exported, and popularized, they form a system. And that system is a poison" [Combinées, exportées,
vulgarisées, elles forment un système. Et ce système est un poison] (Le Pogam essay)). That is where Le Pogam's reaches the heart of his critique--and one that merits some consideration. The system that critique creates from out of the French post-modern Le Pogam appears to suggest, creates the very sort of system that is or ought to be a subject of the sort of critique reserved now for systems other than those they advance.
Le Pogam does not offer a general critique--though one can be made. He has a partcular bone to pick (in the style of Nietzsche) with those consummate utilitarians--the Anglo-Americans who cannot resist making even the most subtle of theories both useful and instrumentally narrow. And not just the community of public intellectuals--this is the stuff that professional revolutionaries, that ambitious political figures, that non-governmental organs might make use of for their own purposes--shielded from the very critique that gave their own criticism (political/social) power projected outward to targeted social or political or ideological targets. He has three public intellectuals in his crosshairs, and one faith system--that infinitely malleable (consider here)) concept/system:"wokeness":
Judith Butler
reads Foucault and invents "performative gender." Edward Said reads
Foucault and invents academic post-colonialism. Kimberlé Crenshaw
inherited this framework and coined the term "intersectionality." At
every stage, the underlying matrix is French: there is no truth, only
power; therefore, every hierarchy is suspect, every institution is
oppressive, every norm is an act of violence, every identity is
constructed—and thus negotiable—and every majority is guilty. [Judith Butler lit Foucault et invente le genre performatif. Edward
Said lit Foucault et invente le post-colonialisme académique. Kimberlé Crenshaw
hérite du cadre et invente l'intersectionnalité. À chaque étape, la matrice est
française : il n'y a pas de vérité, il n'y a que du pouvoir, donc toute
hiérarchie est suspecte, toute institution est oppressive, toute norme est
violence, toute identité est construite donc négociable, toute majorité est
coupable.] (Le Pogam essay)
In a sense, everyone is "woke." That is, everyone from committed Marxist-Leninists to free market acolytes of Milton Freeman, from members of religious sects to identity groupings of all sorts, are awake to the realities and the cognitive cages the presumptions of which constitute a faith in the way things are or ought to be that inspires action grounded in this belief and the construction of meaning from facts that are fed into and serve to reinforce that system's habitus (here invoking that other pillar of left French post-modernity Bourdieu). The one's that Le Pogam targets are those who beyond sort of trying to construct their own belief based ralities, spend a bit of their time tearing down the realities, the cognitive cafges, that stand in the way of their political/social/cultural/religious projects, one of which, of course, may be critiques without invoking the post-modern equivalent of abomination (morally detestable, loathsome, but also fundamental religious offenses, heresy or apostasy. And, indeed, that is the underlying point, it is not that "il n'y a pas de vérité, il n'y a que du pouvoir, donc toute
hiérarchie est suspecte, toute institution est oppressive, toute norme est
violence, toute identité est construite donc négociable, toute majorité est
coupable" (Le Pogam essay) per se. That is, in a sense unproblemmatic; the offense is that the critique applies in only one direction and against one target. What the post-modern right has discovered is that instruments have no ideology, and the very successes of the post-modern left can be turned into the techniques which, when directed against its initial users, can have as powerfully destructive an effect on their own projects as it was meant to have on the original objects of critique.
Thus, for example, that gender is performative tells one nothing other than that gender is performative; that it performative in one system in ways that offend the examiner (the political/social point in Butler), then, suggests two things. The first is that Butler rejects both the values and the performance of those values in the system under observation. Two, that Butler embraces values and performance that are grounded in a faith in other collective construction. In both cases belief is central, and faith is instrumental in disciplining not just the self but the community as an aggregated self to move from one faith based value system around which truth may be extracted from facts, to another. This is indeed performative, but far more in the style of the old fashioned dispuations between Christian and Jewish scholars than it is about anything else. But there is a difference--the disputations became impossible to resolve because the doruce of faith and belief was exogenous to the community (recall the definition of faith among Catholics and Protestants described above). Butler, Said and Crenshaw resort to that quintessentially Enlightenment foundation of "truth"--the signification of facts marshaled to produce (either inductively or deductively) a sense of values and a naturalizing order around which these truths might be confirmed and thus conformed performed in and by the community to which it is meant to apply. And each applies this to a functionally differentiated layer of the social/political order that irritates them and for the purpose of upending what is critiques and substituting a belief system more to their liking--through a vulgarization of dominance, signification, and identity constructs, all constructing a new set of truths built on a new set of belief structures, values, and significations.
The core of Le Pogam's critique, then, may be less about the prophets of the post-modern left and their pronouncements (as irritating as they may be to him); the core problem is the way in which that vulgarization and diminution of post-modern French theory came to be vulgarized by, not the masses, but by actors who saw in them opportunity to prove, by the embrace of this diminished post-modernity, the truths of its core insights ("an entire generation of activists, university bureaucrats, HR executives, journalists, and legislators" [une génération entière d'activistes, de
bureaucrates universitaires, de DRH, de journalistes, de législateurs] (Le Pogam essay))--that power relations can be disguised as knowledge; that words can be signified in quite strategic ways; and that a forest of trees may be the quintessence of the rhizome (or the reverse). Le Pogam explains:
This is how we ended up with a civilization that no longer knows how to say whether a woman is a woman, whether its own history is worth defending, whether merit truly exists, or whether truth can be distinguished from mere opinion. [Voilà comment on a obtenu une civilisation qui ne sait plus dire si une femme est une femme, si sa propre histoire mérite d'être défendue, si le mérite existe, si la vérité se distingue de l'opinion.] (Le Pogam essay).
Le Pogam explains why he thinks this is garbage (merde). In the process he suggests both the fundamental premises of an ordered and ordering collective, and, as well, of the colectives that criticism is also seeking to built, control, and impose: "A civilization
stands firm upon three pillars: the belief that there exists a truth
accessible to reason; the belief that there is a good distinct from
evil; and the belief that there is a heritage worth passing on." [Une
civilisation se tient debout sur trois piliers : la croyance qu'il existe une
vérité accessible à la raison, la croyance qu'il existe un bien distinct du
mal, la croyance qu'il existe un héritage à transmettre]. (Le Pogam essay). It is truly difficult to ague with these three pillars; at the same time it is impossible to assume that what "woke" has sought to bring is not also fundamentally grounded in the same three principles. They have a faith in "their truth." Le Pogam thinks of that truth of the vugarized post post modern as merde. That is fair. Both see and seek truth, but again, what one has is faith, not truth, faith in ther truth of a thing. That that faith can be generated exogenously, or endogenously--from within the human or from beyond humanity. Either way one is back at belief in Logos: "1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 The same was in the beginning with God. 3 All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. 4 In him was life; and the life was the light of men." (John 1:1-3); in principio erat Verbum et Verbum erat apud Deum et Deus erat Verbum; hoc erat in principio apud Deum; omnia per ipsum facta sunt et sine ipso factum est nihil quod factum est; in ipso vita erat et vita erat lux hominum. John 1:1-4 Vulgate). Without Logios--in whatever form, there is only, as Kierkegaard reminds us, only infinite irony and chaos--quite a hard starting place for the constitution of shared realities, and with it their "truths".
It is these pillars that Le Pogam asseerts the "fathers" of th French post-modern sought to blow up. I am not sure that was the plan; though in fairness the three did have a delightfully absurd taste in blowing stuff up, not unlike the political classes of our own day. That was put in this way by Le Pogam: "Out of intellectual play, fascination with suspicion, hatred of the bourgeoisie that had nurtured them." [Pas par méchanceté. Par jeu intellectuel, par
fascination du soupçon, par haine de la bourgeoisie qui les avait nourris.] (Le Pogam essay). Yet that was unavoidable, though well understood; the vulgarization and its mass production--it's English turn, to put in in terms that Nietzsche might have preferred, is the moral sin--not of the fathers of the French post modern, even the French post modern left. It was the corruption of pragmatism, of utility, that spoiled the intellectual broth.
He ends where the French post-modern might have suggested one begins after awakening: in system building. But this is system building fully conscious of the choices that one makes (collectively) in system building--whether it is a conscious embrace of an exogenous source for truth and direction; or whether it emerges from the genius of a people constituted as such for that purpose. What is needed, then, are values, and a belief in values, and a faith in the truth of the values that may be reflected in the facts from out of which justification and assessment may be attempted. That is as true for the construction, or reconstruction of social collectives as it is now going to be for the virtual collectives humans are building, the simulacra into which humans are pouring themselves, the technological creation of our new gods, the belief in the truth of the performance of which will becomes the foundation for the society we all are apparently about to inherit--and inhabit. One ought not care much about the human any more--one ought to focus on the simulacra of the human--their representation or imitation within our techno-constructed hyper-realities. It is to Jean Baudrilliard rather than to the fathers of the post modern, that one ought to turn to be become "woke" in the second quarter of the 21st century.
While simulation is meant to imitate an environment, through a process of replication made possible by reducing the imitated environment to its essence, semiotics suggests that simulation has a more profound effect. The decisive move toward the objectification of reality and its meaning through its simulation (present) and its modeling (future)—that is the quantification, and digitalization of humanity—has brought humanity to a great transformative moment. If a situation, context, or process is now comprehended as and by its own simulation, then the modalities of objectification, of signification, and ultimately of the encounters with meaning and its making, have now (again) removed themselves from an immanent to a transcendent condition. That is, that human activity becomes centered in and manifested through its simulation rather than in the world itself. (Larry Catá Backer, "Describe, Predict, Intervene!—On Objective Subjectivities and the Simulacra of Semiotics in the New Era; Simulated Signification and Mechanical Meaning Making in Managing Post-COVID Human Society," in Frank Fleerackers (ed) The Rearguard of Subjectivity: On Legal Semiotics – Festschrift in Honour of Jan M. Broekman 21-62 (Springer, 2023).
The text of Le Pogam's essay in French, English and Spanish appears below.
