[From the April 2004 _Harpers_. Originally excerpted from the Winter 2004 issue of _Critical Inquiry_.]
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What has become of critique, I wonder, when an editorial in the New York Times contains the following quotation from Republican strategist Frank Luntz:
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"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."
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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. Was I wrong to participate in the invention of this field known as science studies? Why does it burn my tongue to say that global warming is a fact whether you like it or not?
Should I reassure myself by simply saying that the bad guys make use of any weapon at hand, naturalized facts or social construction, as it suits them? Or should we rather bring the sword of criticism to critique itself and do a bit of soul searching -- what were we really after when we were so intent on showing the social construction of facts? Nothing guarantees, after all, that we should be right all the time. There is no sure ground, even for criticism. Isn't this what criticism intended to say: that there is no sure ground anywhere? But what does it mean when this argument is taken away from us by the worst possible fellows as a justification for destroying the things we cherish?
Artificially maintained controversies are not the only worrying sign. What has critique become when Jean Baudrillard argues that the twin towers destroyed themselves under their own weight, undermined by the nihilism inherent in capitalism itself, that the terrorist planes were pulled to suicide by the attraction of this black hole of nothingness? What has become of critique when a bestseller can claim that no plane ever crashed into the Pentagon? Remember the good old days when revisionism arrived after the facts had been thoroughly established? Now we have the benefit of what could be called instant revisionism. The smoke of the event has not yet finished rising before dozens of conspiracy theories begin revising the official account, adding even more ruins to the ruins. What has become of critique when my neighbor in my little Bourbonnais village looks down on me as hopelessly naive, because I believe that the United States was attacked by terrorists? Remember the good old days when university professors could look down on unsophisticated folks, because they naively believed in church, motherhood, and apple pie? Things have changed, at least in my village. I am now the one who naively believes in some simple facts, while the other guys are too sophisticated to be gullible. What has become of critique when there is a whole industry denying that Apollo landed on the moon? What has become of critique when the Total Information Awareness project uses the Baconian slogan Scientia est potentia? Didn't I read that somewhere in Michel Foucault? Has knowledge-slash-power been co-opted by the National Security Agency? Has Discipline and Punish become the bedtime reading of Mr. Ridge?
Let me be mean for a moment: what's the real difference between conspiracy theories and a popularized (that is, a teachable) version of social critique inspired by too quick a reading of Pierre Bourdieu? In both cases, you learn to become suspicious of everything people say, because of course we all know that they live in the thrall of a complete illusio of their real motives. Then, after disbelief has struck and an explanation is demanded, it is the same appeal to powerful hidden agents acting always consistently, continuously, relentlessly. Of course, we in the academy like to use more elevated causes -- society, knowledge-slash-power, empires, capitalism -- while conspiracists like to portray a miserable bunch of greedy people with malevolent intentions, but I find something troublingly similar in the structure of the theories. Of course conspiracy theories are an absurd deformation of our own arguments, but, like weapons smuggled through a fuzzy border to the wrong party, they are our weapons nonetheless.
Perhaps threats have simply changed so much that we are directing our arsenal toward an entirely irrelevant battlefield. After all, masses of atomic missiles are transformed into so many piles of junk once the militants are armed with box cutters and dirty bombs. Or maybe it is that critique has been miniaturized. I have always fancied that what took great effort, cost a lot of sweat and money for people such as Nietzsche and Benjamin, can now be had for nothing, much like the supercomputers of the 1950s, which used to fill large halls and expend vast amounts of electricity but are now accessible for a dime and no bigger than a fingernail.
Is this a patrician spite for the popularization of critique? As if critique should be reserved for the elite and remain difficult and strenuous, like mountain climbing or yachting? We have been complaining about the gullible masses swallowing naturalized facts; would it be unfair now to discredit the same masses for their gullible criticism? Are we like mad scientists who have loosed the virus of critique and now cannot do anything as it mutates, gnawing up everything, even the vessels in which it is contained? Or is it another case of the famed power of capitalism to recycle everything aimed at its destruction? If the dense and moralist cigar-smoking reactionary bourgeois can transform him- or herself into a free-floating agnostic bohemian, moving opinions, capital, and networks from one end of the planet to the other without attachment, why would he or she not be able to absorb the most sophisticated tools of deconstruction, social construction, discourse analysis, postmodernism?
I am not trying to reverse course, to become reactionary, to regret what I have done. My argument is that a certain form of critical spirit has sent us down the wrong path, because of a little mistake in the definition of our main target. The question was never to get away from facts but to get closer to them, not fighting empiricism but, on the contrary, renewing it.
The critical mind, if it is to be relevant again, must devote itself to the cultivation of a stubborn realism, but a realism dealing with what I will call matters of concern, not matters of fact. The mistake we made, the mistake I made, was to believe that there was no efficient way to criticize matters of fact except by moving away from them and directing one's attention toward the conditions that made them possible. But this meant accepting too uncritically what matters of fact are. Critique has not been critical enough in spite of all its sore-scratching. Reality is not defined by matters of fact. Matters of fact are only very partial and very polemical, very political renderings of matters of concern. It is this second empiricism, this return to a realist attitude, that I'd like to offer as the next task for the critically minded.
Whereas the Enlightenment profited largely from the disposition of a very powerful descriptive tool, that of matters of fact -- which were excellent for debunking quite a lot of beliefs, powers, and illusions -- it found itself totally disarmed once matters of fact, in turn, were eaten up by the same debunking impetus. After that, the lights of the Enlightenment were slowly turned off, and some sort of darkness appears to have fallen on campuses. My question is thus: Can we devise another descriptive tool that deals this time with matters of concern and whose import will no longer be to debunk but to protect and to care? Is it really possible to transform the critical urge to an ethos that adds reality to matters of fact and does not subtract from it?
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