Post-Truth Imaginations by Kjetil Rommetveit

Author:Kjetil Rommetveit [Rommetveit, Kjetil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367146818
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2021-11-30T00:00:00+00:00

Notes

For one such example where Lynch reprimands a rather modest proposal to use description in the service of social critique, see: (Bogen et al., 1990). For a reply to Lynch, see: (Pels, 1996b). For a more general critique of Lynch’s stance, see: (Lynch and Fuhrman, 1992).

For a debate between Steve Fuller and Naomi Oreskes on this issue, see: (Oreskes and Baker, 2017). On the reception of Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway within the STS community, see: (Radin, 2019).

John Law, for instance, writes: “[…] ‘actor - networks’ can be seen as scaled - down versions of Michel Foucault’s discourses or epistemes” (Law, 2008). The Clausewitzean dictum in science studies of treating science as if it was nothing but politics is commonly traced back to the Nietzschean-Foucauldian genealogy of power/knowledge. (Pels, 1995).

This argument harks back to Alvin Gouldner’s perceptive critique of the “underdog metaphysics” of the Chicago school sociologist Howard Becker (Gouldner, 1968). The applicability of his critique to large sways of the STS field has been noticed before (Fuller, 1993). That being said, underdog metaphysics has spread far and wide in the social sciences.

The polemic by Foucault against the (Soviet-loyal) party intellectual, was spurred on by a tide of Maoist populism (Khilnani, 1993). Accordingly, the Maoist method of doing factory worker – and prison inmate – inquiries can arguably be described as an avant-la-lettre follow-the-actor-approach.

A very long list of quotations could be marshalled to back this statement up. One will have to suffice: “The notion of ideology appears to me to be difficult to make use of […] Now I believe that the problem does not consist in drawing the line between that in a discourse which falls under the category of scientificity or truth, and that which comes under some other category, but in seeing historically how effects of truth are produced within discourses which in themselves are neither true nor false. […] I think that this is a notion that cannot be used without circumspection” (Foucualt, 1980,p. 118).

To get an idea of what kind of “risks” that Steve Fuller is alluding to, as he, prudently enough, refrain from spelling them out directly, we may refer to Arlie Hochschild’s ethnographic study of how life is coped with in the “cancer belt” of the US (Hochschild, 2016).

Quoted in: Luc Ferry and Alan Renaut (1990) “Preface to English Edition” French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Anti-humanism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, p. xiii.

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