1:

Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse that it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.

Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 1980.

2:

Truth for [Foucault] is not something absolute that everyone must acknowledge but merely what counts as true within a particular discourse… However, it is not difficult to show that a relativist concept of truth of this kind is untenable. If what is true is always relative to a particular society, there are no propositions that can be true across all societies. However, this means that Foucault’s own claim cannot be true for all societies. So he contradicts himself. What he says cannot be true at all.

The relativist fallacy also applies to the concept of knowledge. One cannot hold that there are alternative, indeed competing, forms of knowledge, as Foucault maintains. Inherent in the concept of knowledge is that of truth. One can only know something if it is true. If something is not true, or even if its truth status is uncertain, one cannot know it. To talk, as Foucault does, of opposing knowledges is to hold that there is one set of truths that runs counter to another set of truths. It is certainly possible to talk about beliefs or values that may be held in opposition by the authorities and by their subjects, since neither beliefs nor values necessarily entail truth. But Foucault’s idea that there are knowledges held by the centralising powers that are opposed to the subjugated knowledges of the oppressed is an abuse of both logic and language.

Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists are Murdering Our Past, 1996.

3:

foucault, n. A howler, an insane mistake. “I’m afraid I’ve committed an egregious foucault.”

From the Philosophical Lexicon.

Fred Siegel on the left’s revolt against the masses. 

…in the course of using oppressed groups as their cat’s-paws, [the 68ers] helped raise new barriers to African-American advancement. The 68ers were, their rhetoric notwithstanding, not so much anti-elitist as the vanguard of the Wellsian alternative elite.

Oliver Kamm on Noam Chomsky. 

My article in Prospect, December 2005, maintained that Chomsky was unscrupulous and dishonest in his handling of source material. In his reply to me… Chomsky argued his case by – of all the extraordinary things – lying about his source material… I’d known that this was characteristic behaviour; but to read a straightforward, direct and demonstrable falsehood, constructed especially for me, was a surprise nonetheless.

Deogolwulf on brotherhood.

It is no disadvantage for those who thrill at enmity also to profess a universal brotherhood. There are many men who do not profess any such idea, or who do not do so with the demanded zeal, and who therefore make a most fitting object for hatred.

And, not entirely unrelated, Victor Davis Hanson on the hypocrisies of political correctness.

I’ve previously remarked on the Guardianista tradition of sliding one’s ass over any unattended blame and incubating it as one’s own. So far as I can make out, this is done for some kind of autoerotic purpose. Documenting each and every instance of the phenomenon is, alas, a task too far for any sane being, but a couple of recent examples caught my eye.

First, Dmitri Vitaliev informs readers of Comment is Free:

With the world’s spotlight on China and widespread criticism of its repressive actions, one should not forget that the knowledge and technology used to create the world’s most prominent Big Brother society was designed in the west, often by the very same corporations whose advertisements on TV take up the time between the relay race and the javelin competition.

By much the same logic, Guardian readers will no doubt be happy to blame China for half the wars of the last thousand years on grounds that the Chinese invented gunpowder. No?

Meanwhile, associate editor Seumas Milne looks to events in Georgia and offers the following, er, analysis:

By any sensible reckoning, this is not a story of Russian aggression, but of US imperial expansion and ever tighter encirclement of Russia by a potentially hostile power.

As Tim Worstall points out, Milne also seems to think that reducing Russia’s control over fuel movements from other independent states is some kind of NeoCon provocation. Such is the logic of MilneWorld™.

Further to this, a few more thoughts on postmodernist prose.

It’s sometimes argued, not always convincingly, that the opaque and technocratic language of “critical theory” is necessary in order to “interrogate [the] tacit presumptions [of common sense] and provoke new ways of looking at a familiar world.” And, furthermore, that “some of the most trenchant social criticisms are often expressed through difficult and demanding language.” The implicit gist of such claims – which are remarkably short on persuasive examples – is that if you find this kind of language “difficult” it’s your own damn fault for being an unsophisticated heathen. A version of this argument goes something like this: “You wouldn’t mock specialists in quantum chromodynamics just because their work can be difficult to follow, so why don’t you give theorists of rhetoric, who are every bit as clever and important, the same benefit of the doubt?”

There is, of course, a difference between prose that’s difficult out of necessity – because it deals with fine or esoteric distinctions or describes ideas that are primarily conceptualised in mathematical terms – and prose that’s politically loaded and gratuitously difficult for less edifying reasons. As, for instance, when Ralph Hexter and Daniel Selden insist that clear writing is bourgeois and ideologically contaminated, being as it is, “the approved mode of expression for the society and values of the newly empowered middle class.”

There are plenty of writers who grapple with technical or unobvious ideas, and the good ones make it as easy as possible for the reader to follow the thinking and determine whether or not it’s sound – and if not, to determine where the doubt or error is. Such-and-such a mistake happens there. Or, this doesn’t follow from that. Or this other thing could be the case. This preference for transparency starts a process of critical thinking, or is at least amenable to it. It also entails honesty and the risk of public correction, as opposed to posturing and the hope one won’t be rumbled. This is a matter of no small importance, especially if the ideas in question are supposed to justify an adamant political worldview. Clarity invites dispute, possibly refutation, and refutation of one’s politics can, for some, be intolerable.

Bizarre allegations of subtextual racism have been noted here before, but this one, spotted by Darleen at Protein Wisdom, is, well, stunning. A flip Wall Street Journal article by Amy Chozick on Barack Obama’s slight build has driven Slate’s Timothy Noah to heights of righteous umbrage:

…any discussion of Obama’s ‘skinniness’ and its impact on the typical American voter can’t avoid being interpreted as a coded discussion of race.

Can’t it be avoided, even among sane people?

Chozick insists that she didn’t intend her playful feature about Obama’s physique as potential electoral liability to carry any racial subtext. “I can’t even respond to that,” she told me. “That’s ridiculous.” […] Bob Christie, Dow Jones’ vice president of communications, phoned me in a flash to reaffirm that message. I believe Chozick and Christie when they say that the Journal never intended skinniness to serve as a proxy for race… But I firmly disagree that a racial reading of Chozick’s story is “ridiculous,” and I would counter that any failure on Chozick’s part to recognize such is just a wee bit clueless. […] 

When white people are invited to think about Obama’s physical appearance, the principal attribute they’re likely to dwell on is his dark skin. Consequently, any reference to Obama’s other physical attributes can’t help coming off as a coy walk around the barn. […] Chozick wasn’t asking (and, I feel sure, would never ask) whether Americans might think Obama’s hair was too kinky or his nose too broad. But it doesn’t matter. The sad fact is that any discussion of Obama’s physical appearance is going to remind white people of the physical characteristic that’s most on their minds.

Noah’s determination to detect some lurking racist intent is a tad convoluted and, it seems to me, positively neurotic. Notice how Noah has to insinuate what Chozick really meant, or what she would supposedly be taken to mean, even though he can’t find any of Chozick’s own words to support that insinuation: “Would you want a whole family of skinny people to move in next-door?” Those are Noah’s words, not Chozick’s, and this substitution is done repeatedly. In effect, he’s an indignant ventriloquist. It’s rather like slipping a whoopee cushion on someone’s chair and then looking shocked by the subsequent rasping noise. And, it has to be said, Obama is remarkably thin as presidential candidates go. In fact, the thinness of his neck (rather than its colour) was the thing that caught my attention when I first saw him on TV. It’s just a neck too thin for television. Whether thinness of neck has any relevance to being president, or indeed being black, I really couldn’t say.