Postmodernism and the corruption of the academic intelligentsia

Abstract

The destruction of truth is so advanced in capitalist culture that it should come as no surprise that even in the halls of Critical Theory, imagined sanctum sanctorum of independent consciousness and conscience, truth is now openly profaned and condescended to by some among those who, historically, have been charged with sheltering its sacred flame--the intellectuals. 'The truth never dies, but is made to live as a beggar', goes the Yiddish proverb, reminding us that truth has always suffered in this world. But no intellectual movement of recent memory has so beggared the truth as poststructuralism has. With the postmodernist turn in theory, truth became a dirty word, and affirmation of truth came to be seen as a sign not of conviction but of one's pitiable naiveté. The tide began to turn against truth, and in postmodernism's favour, in the late 1970s. It was then that French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault first boldly put truth in scare quotes. No longer would 'the true' be understood, as it had for millennia, as that which is 'in accordance with fact or reality'. From now on, for a growing and influential sector of the intelligentsia, the true would be posed as a problem to be solved. The prerogative of truth was thus transformed from a right of the oppressed into an object of study for the technical or academic expert.