Bitch. Ph.D.: Freedom of the press, dude

Bitch. Ph.D.: Freedom of the press, dude

Academics believe in the truth, too--the lies of the right wing about postmodernity notwithstanding. That's why we do research and cite our sources. Even if the truth is that 'the truth is unknowable' or, perhaps, 'there is no one truth,' that is a kind of truth; just as, ironically, even the most cynical person who argues that there is no such thing as media fairness or an informed public, argues this as a negative. What is so horrifying about the extreme elements of the right wing nowadays is that, when we see Attorneys General argue that torture is only a question of definitions, rather than a word that points to a material reality grounded in people's bodies; when we see liberals talk about compromising abortion rights as though those rights were only political theory, with no grounding in the bodies of women; when we see the president and vice-president deny, on the record, that they ever said things that we have seen and heard them say; what we are seeing is a denial that there is such a thing as truth or a public, in a sense that is not conceptual, but is actually material and real, and is supposed to be material and real. The point of deconstruction was that language, by its nature, escapes pure referentiality; it was never that the things language tries (imperfectly) to refer to do not exist.


And that's why some of us, even unreconstructed liberal idealists, are starting to occasionally raise the f-word, 'fascism.' Because when those in power use their power to start talking about materal realities as if they were only abstractions, and therefore unimportant or malleable; use language as if it has no referentiality in order to cover up, or distract attention from, the material realities of their actions; then we really, truly are approaching fascism--not in the rhetorical, sloppy way that Godwin's law is meant to poke fun of, but in a very real and true sense.