Politics Of Truth Research Articles

DNA and the politics of truth in socially organized life

We apply a representation of the double helix to explain how truth is managed in the social organization of life. One chain, representing context, is made up of the three materialities through which we move — discourses, time and space. The other chain, representing agency, comprises identity, distinct capitals and practices. The chains are fused by horizontal rods, which represent capillaries of power relating the elemental chains by binding, winding and tangling them together in various ways. The model offers an innovative tool for theorization of socially organized truth relations.

The politics of truth: A critique of Peircean deliberative democracy

Recent discussion in democratic theory has seen a revival of interest in pragmatism. Drawing on the work of C. S. Peirce, Cheryl Misak and Robert Talisse have argued that a form of deliberative democracy is justified as the means for citizens to assure themselves of the truth of their beliefs. In this article, I suggest that the Peircean account of deliberative democracy is conceived too narrowly. It takes its force from seeing citizens as intellectual inquirers, something that I argue is both problematic in itself and relies on a controversial understanding of truth and inquiry. The article goes on to propose reasons for favouring a Deweyan rather than a Peircean account of democracy, one in which deliberation is seen not simply as a matter of arriving at the truth, but as part of a broader view of human flourishing.

The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood

The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood

Book Review: The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings of C. Wright Mills

Book Review: The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings of C. Wright Mills

The ‘truth politics’ of anti‐North Koreanism: the post‐ideological cultural representation of North Korea and the cultural criticisms of Korean nationalism

This essay questions the ‘truth politics’ of anti‐North Koreanism in which a ‘genuine’ figuration of North Korea is presumed to be achievable at the popular level. I define the truth politics of anti‐North Koreanism as the political‐cultural discursive formation obscuring the ideological powerfulness of anti‐North Koreanism that hinges on ‘the normality of nationalism’. The truth politics reinscribes and reinforces the populist and functionalist belief in national unification that justifies developmentalist agendas for North Korea. As an alternative, I discuss the post‐colonial cultural criticism that calls into question the identity politics of popular nationalism, which implicitly performs along the lines of the Sunshine Policy guidelines to naturalize the normality of nationalism under economic developmentalism. The questionable formation of nationalism prevents South Koreans from gaining self‐reflexive access to the way in which heterogeneous tropes of the nation rupturing in the discursive practice of popular nationalism are exploited. But I also critically interrogate the analytical framework presumed within the criticism, because it constrains its own scope and abilities of questioning the truth politics of anti‐North Koreanism the criticism ostensibly targets.

Taking the democratic subject seriously

This article has two objectives. The first is to examine the post‐Marxist concept of the democratic subject, which I argue requires criticism and revision if it is to be coherently integrated into the post‐Marxist theory of democracy itself. The second is to examine the national–democratic project as proposed by the ANC and its allies in terms of this conceptual analysis of the democratic subject. It is argued that a ‘democratic turn’ has occurred in the national democratic project, but that national democratic subjectivity is still caught up in a fantasy of absolute political truth and closure, which interrupts its democratic practice.

"Critchley is Žižek": In Defence of Critical Political Philosophy

In an ironically Žižekian manner, this paper argues that Simon Critchley and Slavoj Žižek's apparent political disagreement (ludic reformist versus strident revolutionary) conceal a common set of preconditions and presuppositions. These presuppositions can be summed by the slogan "the for getting of political philosophy", which more specifically means the forgetting of the difference between philosophy and political life, and the reflective need to find mediations between the two. Critchley's turn to humour honours the notion that politics is about the realm of appearances, while Žižek's frank avowal of the "diabolical evil" of the subject of the death drive makes patently clear the dangers posed by a "politics of Truth".

The politics of truth: selected writings of C. Wright Mills

PREFACE INTRODUCTION: NEW MAN OF POWER, BY JOHN SUMMERS 1. The Powerless People: The Role of the Intellectual in Society 2. The Intellectual and the Labor Leader 3. Sociological Poetry 4. Contribution to Our Country and Our Culture: A Symposium 5. On Intellectual Craftsmanship 6. Thorstein Veblen 7. IBM plus Reality plus Humanism = Sociology 8. Are We Losing Our Sense of Belonging? 9. The Conservative Mood 10. Mass Society and Liberal Education 11. On Knowledge and Power 12. The Power Elite: Comment on Criticism 13. Science and Scientists 14. A Pagan Sermon to the Christian Clergy 15. The Man in the Middle 16. The Big City 17. Culture and Politics: The Fourth Epoch 18. The Cultural Apparatus 19. The Decline of the Left 20. On Latin America, the Left, and the U.S. 21. Soviet Journal 22. Listen, Yankee! The Cuban Case Against the U.S. 23. Letter to the New Left BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE BIBLIOGRAPHY: THE WRITINGS OF C. WRIGHT MILLS

The politics of life after death: Ondaatje’s Ghost

This essay relates Ondaatje’s novel to the philosophical fictions of Foucault and others in order to signal the contribution that literary texts can make to a “political and ethical enterprise that carries anti‐racist dissidence into a deeper confrontation with the history, philosophy, and jurisprudence of ‘transmodernity’” (Gilroy 53). Situating the Sri Lankan civil war within broader geopolitical and legal struggles, Ondaatje’s anti‐war novel diagrams the coming‐to‐dominance of new power–knowledge networks across national and ideological divides – biopolitics (defined by Foucault as the fostering of life in each individual and the population as a whole) as it is overtaken by necropolitics (described by Mbembe as the exercise of power through the wholesale threat and dispensation of death). Anil’s Ghost also elaborates alternate forms of power–knowledge relations with the reader. Thus the novel’s object (emergent transmodernity) and method (experimental dislocation of characters’ and readers’ experiences) can contribute significantly to the rerouting of postcolonial studies towards what Negri terms the “non‐place of Empire” (34). Part I analyses how, through a series of dialogical encounters, Anil’s Ghost displaces fundamental axioms that regulate the politics of truth and the politics of international systems of governance. Part II examines the novel’s method: the aesthetic strategies that both perform the displacements and enlist the reader in this ethical project.

VICTIMHOOD, IDENTITY, AND AGENCY IN THE EARLY PHASE OF THE TROUBLES IN NORTHERN IRELAND

This article explores the representation of victimhood in political discourse and the relation between victimhood, identity, and political agency. The empirical material is drawn from the early days of the Northern Ireland conflict and covers the debate on internment that was in operation from August 1971 until December 1975. Both those supporting and those opposing internment drew on images of victimhood—images that were vital in the construction of legitimacy and political agency. First, the rendering of detailed stories of individual suffering and victimhood produced compassion and empathy—features legitimising the different approaches. Second, the construction of victimhood involved mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, creating “we-them” dichotomies, producing “collectives of victimhood,” which in many cases worked as a platform from which political agency could be voiced. And third, the construction of victimhood produced political truths. The victim was given a particular status embodying a particular moral integrity to determine the truths about “what had really happened,” a status that made the victim a vital agent in the political battle for “the hearts and minds.” The article stresses the importance of studying the representation of victimhood within particular historical contexts and demonstrates the complex and ambiguous effects of the representations of victimhood in violent political conflicts. The examination shows that victimhood has both humanising and dehumanising effects and, depending on the contextual framework, victimhood can create confidence, empowerment, and agency, but also disempowerment and passivity.

The Politics of Truth

The Politics of Truth

The `White Slave Trade' and the Music Hall Affair in 1930s Malta

The music hall affair in 1930s Malta serves as a window into wider social, political issues embodied in the recurring furore that was `white slavery'. Sparked by accusations in London newspapers about sexual exploitation of English women who had come to work as music hall artistes, politicians, newspaper editors, the police and the church in Malta addressed the issue. Although the claims about English women were not true, the stories raised larger questions about prostitution in Malta's night-time leisure economy, and sexual exploitation of foreign artistes and Maltese barmaids did occur in this context. The British reaction followed the pattern of response in other colonies: military authorities chose to focus on the health threat to their personnel posed by what they saw as an indigenous problem of prostitution, rather than acknowledge the effects of colonial rule on local society. Maltese authorities chose to avoid political and economic truths of colonial rule as well: they decided to make the immoral character of the women involved the problem to be addressed. The music hall affair did not champion international human rights, but reflected parochial fears of foreigners and colonial others.

Inconvenient Truths: The Communist Conundrum in Life and Art

Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth, Steven G. Kellman. W. W. Norton and Company, 2005. An Honest Writer: The Life and Times of James T. Farrell, Robert K. Landers. Encounter Books, 2004. The Lives of Agnes Smedley, Ruth Price. Oxford University Press, 2005. Ralph Ellison: A Biography, Arnold Rampersad. Knopf, 2007. In a contentious lecture following his acceptance of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2005, British playwright Harold Pinter offered a pointed distinction between the quest for truth in politics and dramatic art. In the former, truth is unabashedly subordinated to the maintenance of power; in the latter, it exhibits an elusive or contradictory quality, but the search to depict truth is “compulsive.”1 The challenge for scholars in documenting the truth of the lives of twentieth-century US writers captivated by Communism surely requires an attitude analogous to the latter. Yet the difficulty of attaining that standard is apparent in the release by two benchmark university presses of incongruous studies of one of the most politically committed US literary radicals of the past century.

Foucault and the Invisible Economy

This paper discusses the extent to which governmentality provides a critical visibility of the economy beyond its liberal imaginary. It argues that Foucault’s conceptual and historical understanding of liberal governmentality has two traits that encumber a de-centering of the economy from a Foucauldian perspective. The first obstacle results from a persistent asymmetry of the concept of governmentality as it remains solely geared towards replacing the monolithic account of the state. Governmentality is therefore in danger of rendering the economic invisible instead of advancing an analytics of power appropriate to the specificity of this field. The second impediment relates to how Foucault reads the invisibility of the economy asserted in liberal discourse. While Foucault emphasizes how the “invisible hand” imparts a critical limitation towards the sovereign hubris of total sight, the paper unearths a more complex politics of truth tied to the invisible economy. Drawing on selected historical material, the papers shows that the liberal invisibility of the economy rather functions as a prohibitive barrier towards developing novel and critical visibilities of the economy. A Foucauldian perspective on economy, the paper concludes, benefits from piercing through this double invisibility of the economy.

Partisan Thought

AbstractWhat is the relationship between materialism and partisanship today? Starting with an outline of the elements of Lenin's understanding of the partisan character of truth, this intervention outlines some of the challenges posed to a Marxist understanding of partisanship by the influential positions of Michel Foucault and Carl Schmitt, as well as by the recent turn to vitalism and complexity in social theory. On the basis of the confrontation between a Leninist conception of materialist partisanship and its contemporary challengers, the article considers Alain Badiou's recent attempt to revive a 'materialist dialectic' in order to think through the present conditions for formulating a partisan and universalist conception of political truth that would not collapse into mere partiality or outright dogmatism.

Bush, Blair and Hitler? A review of comparative self‐presentation

Abstract This article (while emphatic in stressing the absence of any political or ethical connection between two recent governments, those of George W. Bush and Tony Blair, and one historic one, the genocidal empire of Adolf Hitler), argues that the Nazi regime did in fact anticipate many communications methods pursued subsequently. The Nazis sponsored a communications revolution. The conscious production of political imagery and tableaux, government via symbolic strategies, the rhetoricizing of civic culture and the centrality of the rhetorical vision, all these have become part of our political truth as well as the Nazis'. Such a reality, then as now, is underpinned by spin, rapid rebuttal, duplicity and the construction of a nirvana of statistics and benevolent data. The ultimate fate of all these regimes was bound up with an ethos of government that placed symbolism centre‐ stage; a parallel universe of imagery and symbolism is no basis on which to construct an edifice of permanence. The methodologies of these regimes do sustain comparison, the ends, of course, do not. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The Paranormal and the Politics of Truth: A Sociological Account

The Paranormal and the Politics of Truth: A Sociological Account

Antiessentialismus und Wahrheitspolitik

Discussing aspects of Marx's critique of political economy and Foucault's analytic of power, the text seeks to separate the reflexive stance of anti-essetialism from two positions wich are often seen as being part of it: judgmental relativism and the ,anti-depth war'. To recognise the historical and social relativity of knowledge does not necessarily imply the view that all theories are equally true. And to analyse social structures and dispositions as underlying conditions of events and behavior is not tantamount to a search for metaphysical parallel universes. Criticising Badiou, the paper concludes with a plea for a realist politics of truth as an alternative to either relativist or rationalist conceptions of this topic.

Critical commentary on ‘Social work as art revisited’

While agreeing with the importance of art as a stimulus for the imagination in social work practice, Healy takes issue with the broader aspirations of the article. Healy questions whether art can or should be used to foster “a collective moment of political truth” for social work, as such an inspiration is likely to gloss over the important differences in context and purpose that profoundly shape the nature of social work in the wide variety of contexts where it is practised. Healy argues for the recognition of art as a possible contributor to knowledge and practice but contends that an ongoing and productive engagement with other forms of knowing is equally if not more critical to the development of social work knowledge and identities.

Violências de baixo, violências de cima na revolução russa

Defensores de uma ideologia que fazia da violência das massas o motor da História, de um projeto político fundado no terror como instrumento primitivo e em uma visão radical e explicativa que legitimava o uso da violência a serviço de um modelo político-militar de construção de uma sociedade nova, os bolcheviques souberam, melhor do que seus adversários, instrumentalizar e canalizar as violências sociais. Porém, a brutalização do corpo social do ex-império russo teve, em contrapartida, um impacto crucial sobre o próprio bolchevismo. Ela fortaleceu certos postulados leninistas sobre a violência como "verdade da política" e ativou a identificação da política e da guerra por meio de uma surpreendente inversão da fórmula de Clausewitz, "a política como continuação da guerra por outros meios". Surgiu, assim, uma verdadeira "cultura política da violência" que se instalou, muito rapidamente, no coração do Estado "sucessor" do ex-império czarista, a URSS.