Pierre Waxforce wrote:
>
> Truth isn't the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude,
> nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves...
> Each society has its regime of truth, its `general politics' of truth:
> that is: the type of discourse which 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
>
> When Foucault says this as an intellectual, everyone understands him. When
> Chomsky says this as an activist and outlines the 'general politics', he's
> vilified as a strident, crackpot.

You have to look at whose being spoken to. Foucault addresses power;
Chomsky addresses people.

Anent the "subject": Re Truth: What is she?
I like Derrida's eternal answer to the same question posed about
decconstruction: (Truth) is a calico cat. This is pertinent also to Don
Braydon's comments, as well as the thread circulating around the
definition of racism. The social order is a composite of definitions,
nothing more. Control of and contest for the privilege to name the
universe constitute the core of every social arrangement. The debate is
crucial. But addressed to the personal interests of people, the debate
proceeds (paradoxically) without a point of reference. The argument is
about reading and writing, about inscribing and interpreting discourse.
Because the very fabric of the social cloth is woven of words. But words
are an unstable medium; or rather, they are poly-stable. They always
already (as went the song among Marxians) mean more than one thing.
        This assertion is customarily met with a response that climaxes with
the presentation of some incredibly complex chemical compound, or in a
mathematical expression of certain logical structures that, in being
directed to them the maker of my claim is required to interpret them in
a way that refutes their alleged transparency. No trick at all, of
course. They were inserted in a meaningful conversation in which their
discursive significance had no meaning at all, for the purpose of
demonstrating that certain words always meant same thing always. Thus
their "meaning" in this conversation became that of a weapon, or of some
otherwise objectifiable purport. Their lack of meaning became their
meaning, in a control-of-power-over-definitions struggle.
        So it matters whose definitions obtain. It matters whether you perceive
the outrages of discrimination--of the very real deprivations that arise
from and are the predictable consequences of real social practices--as
being the individual acts of deviants or sociopaths or as practices
embedded in culture that are available to the interests and groups that
hold and exercise existential power. [I define this (with a nod to James
Paul Gee) to be the power to withhold from equitable distribution goods,
which the powerful define and declare to be the common share and
striving, and are the fruits of the collective efforts of the whole
community.] Racism is what we call that power when it is exercised in
the cause of perpetuating inequities for reasons of
physiognomico-cultural variation, on the basis of an allegation that
putative superiority of that set of characteristics related to physical
appearance was isomorphic with presumption that persons possessing those
"superior" characteristics were, ipso facto, possessed of other
"superior" characteristics.
        But just in case you missed the point, there are a lot of other devises
handy to accomplish some of the same things based on other filters:
gender, sexual "preference" (I have always preferred sex; does anyone
not?), increasingly age, always non-racial physical restrictions,
disease (we're already seeing and we'll see more AIDSism), nationalism,
fundamentalism. And then there's the one that we apparently don't have a
name for: moneyism? cashism? Oh? Could it be...capitalism? If you look
closely at who are the primary beneficiaries of the assembled screens,
it is difficult not to conclude that Racism is not the only set of tools
that available to preserve privilege, but it is a primary and pervasive
one.
        You have only to add the racial aspect to any combination of the
previous categories automatic disqualification of each system suffers
for their inferiority--and the consequence is not arithmetic but
geometric. The power in in naming the "object", the thing named not in
the practice but in the private vocabulary of the practice, the
vocabulary of the that is the weapon of the innitiates. Now, people
aren't born knowing those names. It follows that when children learn
those terms, they are use in their environments. They are part of the
whole social fabric in which a child increasingly adeptly but at first
with difficulty and much hesitation learns to weave connections between
itself and the bigs. The words are associated with acts, as is the way
with words, but from any beginning point social agreements and
arrangements that the child experiences antedate its capacity to
participate in them.
        So now, here's the thing. Social arrangements don't just sort of
maintain themselves willy-nilly. They are held in place in complex,
dynamic ways. And the things that hold them together are Discourses.
Discourses shape things by "talking" about them in partiuclar ways.
Discourses are the perpetual (her'n'his)stories of things and events. No
event uninterpretable event is ever observed. Observation is the purpose
of discourse; interpretation is its tool. Discourse is always about
something. That seems trivial, but it is important. Because it is here
that discourse hooks up with the truth, where we began way back there.
That is because truth is a discourse, it is a story, and it changes
depending on who's telling it.
        Somebody acting embarrasingly Derridavitive says (truth) is a calico
cat and racism is social practice. Does that mean he's asserting that
truth is indeed a a specimen of the biological taxonomic "calico cat" to
be apprehended sunbathing on the wicker divan in the gazebo? Or that
there is some homomorphic or analogical resemblance between the catness
of the calico cat and the veracity of truth? Or that the literal
assertion in the reply is to be taken as emblematic and suggestive of
the meaninglessness--you might say the "the missed-the-pointed-ness"--of
the question. Individuality on issues of this magnitude washes out
quickly. Truth is the story of how it is possible to say to think to
imagine that truth is a calico cat.
        In an oft-cited passage at the beginning of "The Order of Things"
Foucault recalls reading a passage in a Borges story about, among other
things, an ancient Chinese philosopher whose taxonomy of animals--the
list of qualifying characteristics for inclusion in the category
"animals" consisted of 13 or 14 items including things such as "objects
which seen from afar resemble mice," and "things that just tipped over
the water jar," and "those belonging to the Emperor"; and Foucault
remarks on what seems to me to be almost joy, certainly the the wonder
he felt upon first reading the passage when it dawned upon him the
impossibility of *thinking that.* His point, I believe, was not that the
taxonomy was "wrong," for it is manifestly "right." All those things are
attributes of the "objects" we regard as "animals." It is that there are
discursive constraints on the possibilities of knowing.
        It should not on that account, however, be thought that, therefore,
because the individualistic assertions are, by my own admission,
possible ways of knowing, they must be accorded equal weight and
consideration with those I have been explaining and to a certain extent
extolling. Indeed that very issue was dealt with already, in regard to
the socialization of children. For all existential cases, like it or
not, the social is antecedent to the individual. People wouldn't do
racist acts if those acts did not resonate sympathetically with social
conditions--agreements and arrangements--such that those acts would have
their intended consequences. The quietly racist landlord is far more
common an encounter than the street-corner demagogue.
        {(the web is an interesting case; texts expressing overtly racist
messages appear with ubiquity and impunity across a wide spectrum of
electronic conversations and bulletin boards. FULL CAPS BOLD FACE
INSULTS AND CHALLENGES IN THE SUBJECT LINES!!!! If we had been having
this conversation in usenet we'd have surely attracted the postings,
along with a necessary complement of antisemitic vituperation from some
proud spokespersons for something called the National Alliance, (or the
National Society for Justice for White People) or other similar outfits,
discussing Chomsky's religion and his therefore necessary complicity,
and ours by association with him, in the subjugation of decent americans
(i kid you not!).}
        But that is just another example. 1. These practices--attacks on
people, abuse, monopolization of bandwidth, happen, 2. They go on and on
and on and on...3. Ther is probably no way to stop it consistent with
the preservation of our own right to speak publically, 4. we therefore
need to recognize it for what it is and work to remove or remake the
conditions that encourage its residuation.
        I'm not saying racism is social is a definition. I am saying it is a
discourse. It is a calico cat. It is a statement about the context in
which the definition necessarily occurs.
wearily
konopak

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