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extent to which the "disturbing" has come to be not only expected
but patronized and cultivated as a form of consumption. (One
notices that his followers don't appear to find Barthes' s ideas partic–
ularly disturbing). On Barthes's behalf, one could reply that he rec–
ognizes this, that his point is that the
really
disturbing has to be dis–
tinguished from the comfortably assimilable forms of disturbance.
But recognizing a problem is not confronting it. Still unanswered is
the question, What is particularly threatening about attacks on
essentialism to the operations of shopping malls or multinational
corporations?
The problem is that , even if we concede that interpretive norms
are inevitably political and that the will to truth is necessarily a will
to power, we still have the task of determining how this politics and
this power work in particular instances. Since the same theory can
be
used
for different and opposing political purposes, there is no way
of determining a priori whether essentiali sm, antiessentialism , or
any other theoretical tendency is radical or reactionary. In this
respect, maxims such as "everything is power" and "everything is
political" are not false so much as platitudinous, as would be the
proposition that everything is chemical. That's not to say that the
omnipresence of power is negligible or dismissable; as we ' ve seen ,
failing to recognize it can lead to neglect of important questions. But
to say that everything is power or politics is merely
to
pose a ques–
tion and not to answer it. The problem remains,
What follows
from
that proposition? Specifically, does it follow that if interpretations
are socially produced, interpretations are
compromised,
and if so, how
and to what degree?
The thinker who has most insisted on the omnipresence of
power is, of course, not Barthes but Foucault, yet Foucault has
taken con tradictory posi tions on what this proposition may mean.
He has said that "among the reasons it is difficult to have a dialogue
with the Americans and the English is that for them the critical ques–
tion for the philosopher is ' Is it true?' Whereas the German-French
tradition consists basically of posing the question, 'Why do we think
as we do? What effect does it have?' " As an observation about the
contrasting philosophical tendencies of Anglo-American vs. conti–
nental thought, this statement obviously oversimplifies , yet its point
is well taken. To ask whether a proposition is true or false is not the
same as asking what are its origins and consequences . Foucault
implies that he is concerned not with whether truth is possible, but
