Post-Structuralism
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Whether all this was or was not what the founding fathers of poststructuralism actually held, such scepticism rapidly became a fashionable style in Left academic circles. To employ words like 'truth', 'certainty' and the 'real' was in some quarters to be instantly denounced as a metaphysician. If you demurred at the dogma that we could never know anything at all, then this was because you clung nostalgically to notions of absolute truth, and to a megalomaniac conviction that you, along with some of the smarter natural scientists, could see reality 'just as it was'. The fact that nowadays one encounters extremely few believers in such doctrines, not least among philosophers of science, did not seem to deter the sceptics. The model of science frequently derided by post-structuralism is usually a positivist one - some version of the nineteenth-century rationalistic claim to a transcendental, value-free knowledge of 'the facts'. This model is actually a straw target. It does not exhaust the term 'science', and nothing is to be gained by this caricature of scientific self-reflection. To say that there are no absolute grounds for the use of such words as truth, certainty, reality and so on is not to say that these words lack meaning or are ineffectual. Whoever thought such absolute grounds existed, and what would they look like if they did? One advantage of the dogma that we are the prisoners of our own discourse, unable to advance reasonably certain truth-claims because such claims are merely relative to our language, is that it allows you to drive a coach and horses through everybody else's beliefs while not saddling you with the inconvenience of having to adopt any yourself. It is, in effect, an invulnerable position, and the fact that it is also purely empty is simply the price one has to pay for this. The view that the most significant aspect of any piece of language is that it does not know what it is talking about smacks of a jaded resignation to the impossibility of truth which is by no means unrelated to post-1968 historical disillusion. But it also frees you at a stroke from having to assume a position on important issues, since what you say of such things will be no more than a passing product of the signifier and so in no sense to be taken as 'true' or 'serious'. A further benefit of this stance is that it is mischievously radical in respect of everyone else's opinions, able to unmask the most solemn declarations as mere dishevelled plays of signs, while utterly conservative in every other way. Since it commits you to affirming nothing, it is as injurious as blank ammunition. Deconstruction in the Anglo-American world has tended on the whole to take this path. Of the so-called Yale school of deconstruction — Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman and in some respects Harold Bloom - de Man's criticism in particular is devoted to demonstrating that literary language constantly undermines its own meaning. Indeed de Man discovers in