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PARTISAN REVIEW
Few postmodernists would endorse such radical subjectivism. Yet if
most of them balk at the idea that they too are prisoners of a regime of
truth, the cloud they cast on the notion of disinterest makes it difficult to
raise hard questions about a scholar's work. In such a climate of suspicion,
outright lies often are tolerated as personal "truths." After hearing a lec–
ture on the classical era that was filled with such personal "truths," the
classicist Mary Lefkowitz wondered if "subjects like history and philoso–
phy will be replaced by indoctrination, and each of us will believe the
brand of 'truth' that best serves his or her own selfish purposes." Her fears
may not be excessive, if the remarks of a Baltimore county school official
are anything to go by. Claiming "we know for a fact that so much of his–
tory has been distorted, that it's very difficult to determine what is true,"
she said that "our responsibility is to present it all, and let the children sort
it out." How will the children do the sorting when the teachers themselves
have abandoned the criteria for evaluating competing truth claims? And
who will choose the different brands of "truth"?
These brands are likely to be selected according to the principle of
representation, because the road from suspicion inevitably leads to repre–
sentation - to the notion that every group must be accorded a representative
share of the curricul um. Representation may seem to be the answer to the
problems that arise from the abandonment of disinterest, but no educa–
tional system can possibly respond to the clamor for representation on the
part of myriad and competing and overlapping groups, such as those
defined by race, sex, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, and so on.
In an interview given shortly before he died, Foucault seemed to be
aware of the danger that postmodernist suspicion holds for intellectual
life. Asked why he didn't engage in polemics, Foucaul t answered that "in
the serious play of questions and answers, in the work of reciprocal eluci–
dation, the rights of each person are in some sense immanent in the
discussion." A serious discussion, Foucault implies, requires that all partic–
ipants be given the benefit of the doubt, that everyone is assumed to be
engaged in a disinterested search for the truth. According to Foucault, the
polemicist takes a different view; he "proceeds encased in privileges that
he possesses in advance and will never agree to question.... The person
he confronts
is not a partner in the search Jar truth
[emphasis mine], but an
adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is harmful and whose very exis–
tence consti tutes a threat." Foucaul t seems to have realized that "a partner
in the search for the truth" must be presumed to be disinterested.
Otherwise, no serious discussion is possible.
