Saturday, June 27, 2020

Discourse Wars

According to @kevinroose, one of the most popular posts on Facebook yesterday was a story about a Vietnam War memorial supposedly vandalized by BLM protesters. Except that the photo was from 2016, the vandals weren't anything to do with BLM, and the story had been debunked weeks ago.

Someone called Jeff responded on Twitter, claiming that Kevin and others were missing the point. Yes the picture is incorrect but doesn't subtract from all the other memorials the BLM movement did vandalize. And someone called James argued that BLM is still a group that doesn't give a damn about America and that is trying to destroy everything that it stands for. So it wouldn't have surprised me in the least if they had done that since it's in keeping with who they are and how they think.


Jeff and James don't seem bothered by the fact that the story is fabricated, because in their eyes it confirms some deeper truth. A truth in which one memorial is the same as another memorial, in which an act in 2016 described by locals as ignorant, having no sense of history is conflated with a series of acts motivated by an acute sense of historical injustice, and in which any attack on the symbols of this historical injustice counts as destroying everything America stands for.


Michel Foucault argued that each society had its regime of truth.
The possibility exists for fiction to function in truth, for a fictional discourse to induce effects of truth, and for bringing it about that a true discourse engenders or manufactures something that does not as yet exist. Foucault


Michel Foucault, “The History of Sexuality,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–77, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, JohnMepham, Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 193

Daniel Funke, Vietnam memorial was not vandalized by Black Lives Matter protesters (PolitiFact, 4 June 2020)

Daniele Lorenzini, What is a Regime of Truth? (Le Foucaldien, 1(1), 1. 2015) http://doi.org/10.16995/lefou.2

Related post: The Habitual Vice of Epistemology (June 2019) 

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