When Truth Seems Ever-Elusive: The Case of Contemporary Legends

Carlos Renato Lopes

Paulista University, Brazil

“Truth is the name we give to the choices to which we cling. If we let go of them, we would emphatically say they

were false, for we respect the truth so much.” Paul Veyne (1983: 127)

1. Introduction

Unsuspicious moviegoers and pay phone users are being stung by HIV-laced

needles strategically planted as a means of revenge or out of sheer cruelty. Club scene

habitués are getting doped in the middle of parties and waking up the next morning

immersed in a bathtub surrounded by ice just to find that their kidneys have been

snatched for the purpose of international body parts trafficking. Innocent fast food place

eaters are being exposed to the risk of contamination from all sorts of unthinkable

ingredients deliberately added to their happy meals. Schoolgirls (and boys) are terrified

of going to the school bathroom by themselves lest they bump into the ghost of the

bloody bathroom blonde (in Brazil, the loira do banheiro), an ex-student whose

unreturned love for a teacher led her to suicide in the premises. All-too-frequent cell

phone users are suddenly dreading for the health of their brains, which might as well be

exposed to the risk of irreversible damage, or even cancer. Are any of these stories true?

Are we justified in fearing them?

Just a whole lot of urban myths, some will say. Contemporary legends, or more

popularly named, urban legends. That is all this is about. A (not so) modern-day form of

mythology which, at most, serves the purpose of symbolically recycling the same old

fears and apprehensions: fear of death, fear of contamination. But is that all there is to

it? Are contemporary legends simply a matter of “believe it at your own will”?

In this article, of a rather theoretical order, I wish to claim that there are certain

regimes of truth which allow a society like ours to keep reinventing, sending and

transmitting such stories, whether they are perceived to have actually taken place or not,

somewhere and at some point in time. Actually, when one looks at contemporary

legends, one cannot avoid the issue of truth that surrounds them. It may appear

explicitly in the very proposition of the narrative, whereby the narrator claims that she

will tell something that “really happened”, not to herself, but, typically, to someone

known by someone else she knows. It may also be read into the reactions of listeners or

readers of such narratives, in the form of incredulity, doubt or perhaps straightforward

belief. And it may, of course, be detected in the struggle of commentators who aim at

establishing the scientifically, technically attested falsity – or at least, the implausibility

– of such reports. No matter how plausible these might seem.

I would join Foucault (1971/1996; 1975-6/1999; 1979/1996) here on the belief

that every discursive practice has the capacity to generate effects of truth which are

more or less potent and enduring. Such possibility of the creation of truth effects in and

through discourse is due to an inescapable element to the subjects of this discourse: the

will to truth. So it would seem that the question of whether contemporary legends are

true or false cannot be answered adequately – or at least not beyond a mere factual

investigation in terms of “this one actually took place” vs. “this one actually did not –

unless we consider the fact that legends are transmitted within socially contextualized

practices, in which certain programs of truth are at stake.

Speaking of program of truth implies letting go of a traditional conception of

truth according to which a cognoscent subject, free from power relations, can accede to

a truth that is rational and universally validated. In the history of philosophy, we could

trace the climax of that belief back to the enlightening. It is in the late 18 th century,

though, that this view will begin to be systematically questioned. And a certain

genealogy of that history of the conception of truth in philosophy is what we set out to

do in the following sections. For that task, I draw upon three major currents of critical

thinking, themselves discontinuous regimes of (philosophical) truth, which are

nonetheless constitutively partial in that they aim at deconstructing the claim that truth

is one and unique. The three currents are: Heidegger’s conception of truth as untruth

(errancy), Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s view of truth as will to power (and hence will to

truth), and finally the pragmatist view of truth as a language strategy proposed more

recently by Rorty. Finally, we relate these three currents to the concept of programs of

truth, employed by Veyne in connection to his analysis of the different approaches

towards myth.

2. Heidegger’s Ontological Truth versus the Metaphysical Tradition

The search for truth is, to a certain extent, co-extensive to the very history of

Western philosophy, or at least to a long established metaphysical tradition of doing

philosophy. From Plato to the 20th century American pragmatists, we will hardly find a

school or current of philosophical thought which has not, to a higher or lesser degree,

examined this issue.

Let us begin to unravel this web by picking up on one of its many possible

threads: Heidegger’s view of being and truth. In Time and Being (1927/1995),

Heidegger starts out by proposing the woking concept of Dasein (the “being there”) to

account for his project of describing the mode of existence of the being-in-the-world.

The Dasein is a construct, an instance which projects itself, so to speak, towards the

understanding of the Being in its totality. For the German philosopher, the metaphysical

inclination of an entire philosophical tradition which begins with Platonism has led to a

gradual abandonment of the specificity of the Being (in capital letters), favoring a split

between entity and being and the eventual erasure of the latter. From Plato to Nietzsche,

with Aristotle, the Romans, Descartes and Kant inbetween, all of them posited one form

of metaphysics which gradually constructed the entity as an essence, or the only

category by which existence and truth could be measured – be it in an idealist or

rational-scientific sense.

Plato, the father of all metaphysics, set the ground for the tradition that places

the being in a world of ideas, as opposed to the concrete living entity. Aristotle, in his

turn, apparently a materialist unlike Plato, also needed to take that supposed split for

granted. It was the time when the idea of truth was established as one of a

correspondence to things – an adjustment of the eye to the object, that is, of the way of

seeing to the nature of things. At the Roman period, characterized by the rise of the

concept of empire, Platonism begin to give way to the notion of correction. Being

truthful meant having the correct, fair view of reality. With modernity, fundamentally

with Descartes, the entity was hoisted up to the condition of cognoscent subject, the

supreme being to whom all the knowledge and all the truth were conditioned. Truth

becomes a subject-object relation, a central one in our very conception of epistemology.

Finally, Nietzsche, by categorically denying any essence to the being – the entity being

all that was left from metaphysics – stands out as the “last of the metaphysicians”,

according to Heidegger’s reading.

Looking retrospectively at this tradition, without leaving himself outside it,

however, Heidegger proposes a sort of “step back” in the direction of the pre-Socratics,

with whom an initial understanding of the non-separation between being and entity

came to place. Heidegger does that not out of nostalgia, but rather as a sort of revelation

of the “aborted fate” of the understanding of the Being as the fundament of existence – a

fate which metaphysics set out to obscure to its maximum force, forgetting that it forgot

the Being. In sum, metaphysics abandoned the being as there is (a spark, a force, a

revelation) and embraced the being as is. Hence the curious paradox: the entity is, but

the being is not.

In order to recover the Being in its specificity, that is, the ontological nature of

existence, we must let go of the most immediate perception we hold of ourselves, a

perception which is grounded on dichotomies such as subjectivity and objectivity, mind

and world, empiricism and idealism. As Jonathan Rée (2000: 8) points out, the view that

Heidegger wishes to distance himself from is incorporated into the very fabric of

Western philosophy, throughout its history, and it is enmeshed into our very quotidian

self-knowledge.

Men are already born with a certain call for ontology, alternating between the

understanding they have of themselves as being part of a universe of things ready-at-

hand – that is, things which only exist because they serve a function, or which relate to

men in an instrumental way – and the opening to a set of “more abstract” questions

which accompany them throughout life, including: “What does being mean?” and

“What is truth?”. What occurs is that men are so absorbed by everydayness that they

tend to abstract things as being lost in an impersonal collectivity, acting as a mere

beings-among-things and moving away from their authenticity.

When men are immersed in this everydayness, and this is a point which more

closely interests us here, they engage in “inautheutic” activities, such as curiosity,

ambiguity and idle talk (rumors included), which are, according to Heidegger, forms of

“corrupted discourse” common sense forms of evading the self-knowledge of Dasein.

The attachment to those forms reinforces the trivial impersonality of the being-among-

others’ mundane world. When everything becomes accessible to all, in an indifferent

and shapeless factuality, the things at hand become more and more instrumental, which

leads to an opacity in the relation between the entity and its beliefs.

But what does being authentic actually mean to Heidegger? It is certainly not a

question of searching for an essential, subjectivized, isolated Being face to face with its

own individuality. Rather, it is a question of comprehending the authentically

incomplete and fragmented nature of the Being in its totality, since the Being is marked

by a constitutive flaw of the very being-in-the-world. To be authentic, the being needs

to open up to the freedom of letting-be, letting things reveal themselves as they are. The

being needs, paradoxically, to find itself as unescapably inauthentic, living immersed in

an universe of ready-at-hand things. Thus, inauthenticity is not merely an error or moral

flaw, but an integral part of authentic existence.

It is actually in the opening towards revelation – as discovery, unveiling – that

the question of truth1 comes to place. To Heidegger, truth is inseparable from the Being

that unveils it – truth not being, therefore, a property which is independent from things.

All truth is relative to the Being of Dasein. Truth exists necessarily as a function of

Dasein, for since men search for self-understanding, he opens himself up to the

unveiling of truth.

Heidegger illustrates this proposition by taking Isaac Newton’s laws as an

example. The discovery of such laws, according to the philosopher, is only possible as a

result of the projection of the historically situated existence of the Dasein, which may

unveil to us a permanent aspect of nature as it really is. In other words, when the laws

are discovered, they prove, as a result of the opening to truth operated by the Dasein, to

be entities which already existed. It is due to this opening that science becomes

accessible to us.

It might seem, at first, that Heidegger hardly distances himself from an idealist

view of truth – a truth to whose sublime realm we need to ascend via transcendental

awareness, letting go of our individual peculiarities, ridding ourselves of our ordinary

everydayness. However, it is not in those terms that Heidegger puts the question. On the

contrary, to Heidegger the origin and anchor of all our knowledge is fundamentally

ontological, that is, it is bound to the category of Being as being-with, being-among-

others. Relational being. Awareness, to the philosopher, is not of a subjective essence,

but rather the “listening” of a possible place of authenticity, a possible place of opening

to an unveiling which, already by constitution, presents itself as veiling due to the very

mode of the being-in-the-world that is inherent to Being.

But Heidegger goes deeper into the problematic of truth when he talks about

non-truth and erring as instances inseparable from truth, and not merely as its logical

opposites. If, as we have seen, truth is unveiling it is because it is already born as veiling

its totality. The fact that we are all invariably subject to this veiling (or dissimulation)

makes it a presupposition and fundament to the very unfolding of the being-in-the-

world. So Heidegger will then tell us that this veiling is itself veiled, since, inseparable

1 Heidegger uses the concept of aletheia, the word used by the mithycal-poetical tradition of the Greeks to refer to truth, and which literally means “unveiling”.

from all truth, it impedes truth from being conceived as total unveiling, never coming to

be recognized by the being-there as radical deprivation. As Waelhens and Biemel

summarize:

“The unveiling is always partial, particular. It takes place against a

backdrop of veiling which it helps to dissimulate by force of its own

progress. That which is known about an entity in particular casts to a

shadow the entity in its totality; the very success of that unveiling implies

the dissimulation of that which is necessarily occult.” (Waelhens and

Biemel 1948: 47, my translation)

Such a conception has clear implications for man’s attempt to impose himself as

the measure of all things, since he is blind to that forgetting. As Ernildo Stein points out,

“in the modern tradition, the subject has always been the measure of truth. Measure as a

condition of possibility”, and as such, “the human being presents him/herself has the

parameter for all propositions which refer to contingent situations where there is truth or

falsity” (Stein 1993: 191, my translation). In fact, to Heidegger, it is in the technique, in

the modern knowledge of science, that the zenith of that metaphysics occurs, by which

the entity is taken to be the reference for all things.

It is thus that the entity errs, and has always done it. In other words, it is

condemned to errancy. Errancy understood not as the mere accidental or isolated

mistake, but rather “the domain of the history of those entanglements in which all which

all types or errors get caught” (Heidegger 1930/1961, section 7, my translation). And

this errancy and the dissimulation of the dissimulation – or forgetting – constitute the

anti-essence of man, something that, from within the original essence of truth, and

belonging to that essence, is opposed to it.

We may then conclude that truth, in its origin, is always-already non-truth, not

in the sense of a logical opposite to truth, but rather in the sense of deprivation, an

incompleteness, since it operates dialectically, through the historical man’s errancy, that

is, through the manifestation of the dissimulation/veiling of its totality in the errancy of

everyday quotidian life.

Even then, in one more demonstration of this dialectical thinking which aims at

eliminating the facility of binary logics, Heidegger reminds us that if men can

experience this errancy as errancy, and not simply let themselves be absorbed by it, they

may guide themselves – dialectically, since one thing founds or is inside the other –

towards essential truth2.

So, as we have seen, Heidegger tries to break from an epistemological-

metaphysical tradition by recovering the Being and truth in their ontological nature.

Nevertheless, it must be made clear that such rupture just cannot take place from

“outside” that tradition, as if the concepts which are being subject to revision could be

erased in all their extension, and by some voluntary decision. That is what Derrida

posits when he speaks of double mark. To him, there is no sense in abandoning the

concepts of metaphysics in order to shake metaphysics, since we do not possess any

language that is strange to this history; “we cannot enunciate any destructive proposition

that will not have been forced to slip into the shape, the logic and the implicit

postulations of that which it itself would like to contest” (Derrida 1967/2002: 232).

Each specific borrowing brings to surface a whole web of meanings from which

it is taken. That is how Heidegger, although denying the possibility of the discovery of

an absolute truth, is still talking about an original truth. That is how, while speaking of

truth and non-truth as dialectically constitutive elements of that essence of truth, he is

still talking about truth in the terms of presence.

It would seem, however, that there is no escape from this “play”, to use the

Derridian term. Derrida himself, in his Plato’s Pharmacy (1972/2005), develops the

problematic of truth-as-presence already based on the discussion that Heidegger was

able to advance. He speaks of non-truth, that is, the disappearance of truth as presence

as being the very condition for the manifestation of truth. In a relation of

supplementarity. He says that iterability – the possibility of repetition, of duplication –

is the condition by which the present-entity can be unique, identical to itself. More

specifically: “the true and the untrue are forms of repetition. And repetition is only

possible in the graphic of supplementarity” (Derrida op. cit.: 121, my translation), that

is, replacing by adding. Derrida, then, relocates the issue: he builds his arguments on

terms that echo Heideggerian philosophy, but he does not necessarily “overcome” that

philosophy.

3. Nietzsche and Foucault: Truth as a Will 2 Waelhens and Biemel (1948: 55) point out that dialectics is a hallmark of Heidegger’s philosophy. But unlike Hegel’s diaIectics, which aims at subsuming the oppositions into a higher synthesis, Heidegger’s dialectics presents the oppositions as definitely unresolvable – which does not mean a destruction of the unit of his thought. Rather, we might say, as Derrida would do later (1972/2001), that this is a “deconstruction’.

One of the hallmarks of Nietzsche’s philosophy is the idea that there is no truth

as knowledge of the world as it is. The German philosopher was opposed to the idea of

a possible apprehension of reality by means of language, since there would not be a pre-

existing delimited universe of “things to know”. In fact, Nietzsche proposed that we

abandon once and for all any attempt of “knowing the truth”. To him, we should let go

of the idea that language is capable of covering and “representing the whole of reality –

a reality that is supposedly determinable and whose truth we could unveil.

How does knowledge work, then? Nietzsche will tell us that knowledge is men’s

invention, that is, it is not something which is absolutely inscribed in human nature, just

waiting for a revelation. At its root, knowledge, rather than arising as the result of an

impulse towards identification, an affection or passion for its object, it is the fruit of a

will to power, which “mines” its object and seeks to annihilate it in all its menacing

potential. It is as if we needed first to reject the object only then to bring it back to its

domain, already tamed, already molded. This implies that each and e very form of

knowledge, including science and technique, becomes necessarily perspective, partial

and oblique.

Thus, if this knowledge, which is the outcome of a historical will, leads to what

we call truth, truth is, according to this reasoning, nothing more than the result of

contingent human relations, to which we seek to ascribe universal status by means of a

will to truth. Nietzsche’s classical definition, proposed in the essay “On Truth and Lie in

an Extra-Moral Sense”, perfectly synthesizes this thought:

“What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and

anthropomorphisms -- in short, a sum of human relations, which have

been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically,

and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a

people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what

they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power;

coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no

longer as coins.” (Nietzsche 1873/1977: 46-7)

To Nietzsche, then, truth is interested knowledge, the brainchild of a will which

creates its own opposition between true and false, that is, the effect of truth. It appears in

the fashion of arbitrary metaphors, which nonetheless move on to become literal, taking

on a conventional and naturalized form throughout history. The original intuitive

metaphors are therefore taken for the things themselves.

But man “forgets” it. He forgets that he has created his own truths, since he has

built himself and things within a paradigm of rationality. He believes that he builds up

from an essence and that language serves merely as a transparent conduit for that

essence. He believes that he can look into the real from the outside. And that is what

allows him to think of science and philosophy in terms of discovery of truths. As Arrojo

well observes, the perspective proposed by Nietzsche leads us to the conclusion that

“men do not discover ‘truths’ independently from their will to power or their survival

instinct; they rather produce meanings and hence knowledge which is established

through the conventions that discipline men in social groups” (Arrojo 1992: 54, my

translation).

The production of solid and naturalized meanings does not take place, however,

in a rational dimension only; it also occurs in man’s relation with myth and art. He

allows himself to be tricked by the illusion of finding an ever reinvented, particular, new

form of relating to the world of dreams. As long as it does not cause him any visible

harm, he will be “charmed” when he listens to epic tales being told as true, when he sees

an actor play a king more regally than the king himself and, why not say it – adding one

more example to the ones Nietzsche proposes –, when receiving and transmitting urban

legends on the Internet.

The Nietzschean notion that truth does not exist as a pre-existing absolute fact of

reality, but that it may exist as an effect – even if necessarily illusional – points to the

utilitarian nature of truth. Nietzsche claims that knowledge, inasmuch as it presents itself

as a set of truthful and reliable beliefs, may serve certain purposes, but not others, and

that certain things can be described as useful to certain kinds of people but not to others –

which only reinforces the author’s refusal of the idea of truth as correspondence. That is,

instead of corresponding to a factual reality which is independent from human beings,

truth is proposed by Nietzsche as a way of meeting human desires, needs and

uncertainties.

As I discuss further below, such reasoning allows us to place Nietzsche next to a

pragmatist view of reality. It is here, however, that there seems to lie an apparent

contradiction in Nietzsche’s philosophical project – at least as it is approached by those

commentators who aim at reconciling, on the one hand, the refusal of any metaphysical

aspiration to truth, explicitly posited in his first works and, on the other hand, the

investment in “truths” of a metaphysical vocation themselves, such as the eternal return

and the will to power presented in his later works (Clark 1990/1998). Those

commentators put the question in terms of a “self-refutation”: would Nietzsche be

denying himself, in his own terms, by proposing metaphysical truths when those could

not even exist in the first place? Would this actually be an irreconcilable paradox?

The answer to those questions does not seem so complicated when, once more to

our aid, Derrida (1972/2001b.) tells us that metaphysics is so intimately circumscribed to

language that it cannot be attacked without our using its very own concepts. It is

precisely through contradiction and apparent self-refutation that Nietzsche develops his

thinking – for, when proposing his philosophical insights, he is not necessarily claiming

universal truths. The notion of a final transcendental truth is not necessarily attacked

when one posits, for example, that all truth is a function of the human – exceedingly

human – will to power. When he does that, Nietzsche is not fall in contradiction with his

anti-metaphysics. On the contrary, he is putting to practice another of his important

philosophical insights: that which claims that every form of knowledge – and,

consequently, every form of truth – is necessarily perspective, making it impossible to

aspire to an absolute and definite apprehension of reality. As Mosé summarizes: “by

affirming that truth is a value, Nietzsche wishes to desacralize this evaluative principle,

revealing its condition as a human invention: truth is an idea, a construct of thought, it

has a history” (Mosé 2005: 31). It is, therefore, inescapably partial.

One might also “defend” Nietzsche against the charge of contradiction by

evoking the affirmative nature of his project, that is, his move towards affirming life.

According to the philosopher, in order for us to go on living, we must preserve certain

classifying categories (which language consolidates) not because they corresponde to the

nature of things, but simply because they give us the necessary illusion of knowledge.

Nietzsche holds on to the notion that things exist in a flux, which language only puts

apart for practical and utilitarian purposes; but that putting apart does not necessarily

advance our understanding – it just makes our lives easier by giving us an illusion of

comprehending (Blackburn 2006: 169). That is how we can interpret

It is from this point of view that we can interpret, for example, the “universal

truths” of the will to power and the eternal return not as a (contradictory or self-refuting)

recovery of metaphysics, but rather as a proposition for “a rediscovery of the creative

nature, which would occur as the result of an explicit account of the metaphorical nature

of words and truth” (Mosé 2005: my translation) or, in other terms, a proposition for a

rediscovery of “the ‘attitudes towards life’ which help one to live life in the most life

affirming way possible” (Olson 2001: 6).

Finally, in keeping with Nietzsche perspectivism, we might say that his ideas can

in fact sound contradictory, but this can only be affirmed from a certain point of view –

or program of truth – certainly not one which seeks in the very Nietzschean project some

kind of “universal truth”.

Another important thinker sees the contradiction in Nietzsche as vital, and not

self-refuting. I am referring to Foucault. Directly influenced by Nietzsche, the French

philosopher finds here the inspiration for one of his most fundamental themes: the

relation of interdependence between power and knowledge. Let us examine how this

interdependence is connected to Foucault’s approach to truth.

According to Foucault (1971/1996: 13-21), truth is an important external

exclusion procedure in the order of discourse, which operates by means of the true/false

opposition. When one looks into a discourse, at the level of the sentence or proposition,

such opposition is neither arbitrary nor violent. It does not change either: the proposition

is always true or always false. But when it comes to identifying what has been,

historically, the will to truth that pervades our discourses and what sort of separation

rules it, then truth presents itself as a historical and institutionally sustained system of

exclusion. Great transformations which our societies have gone through over the

centuries, including scientific discoveries, can, to a certain extent, be interpreted as being

the result of always new wills to truth which were gradually imposed on a number of

institutional practices, such as pedagogy, empirical research, or the exploitation of

technological resources.

But something very peculiar occurs with true discourse: by presenting itself as

freed from desire and power, it simply cannot recognize the will to truth that pervades it;

that is, in order to establish itself as true, discourse cannot help but disguise itself as a

product of that will. Thus, what we are allowed to see is “a truth that would be rich and

fertile, a sweet and insidiously universal force”, and not the “prodigious machinery

designed to exclude all those who, time after time, in our history, have tried to evade that

will to truth and question it against truth” (Foucault 1971/1996: 20, my translation).

It can already be noted that truth is not produced as an autonomous organism, rid

of mistake, hovering over human errancy, independent from the institutional mechanisms

of social action and control or from human desire. Truth is definitely attached to those

mechanisms and, therefore, to power. Foucault reminds us that in any society the

multiple power relations which characterize the social body cannot be established or

function outside a regime of truth, that is, without being sustained by true discourses. In

the author’s words:

“There is no exerting of power without a certain economy of true

discourses which function in, from, and through that power. We are

subject by power to the production of truth and we can only exert power

by producing truth. (...) After all, we are judged, condemned, classified,

obliged to duties, destined to a certain way of living or to a certain way of

dying as a result of true discourses that carry with them specific power

effects, truth effects.” (Foucault 1975-6/1999: 28-9, my translation)

Thus, Foucault concludes that the will to truth, originated from the historically

constructed division between right and wrong, or true and false, is nothing more than

the excluding will to power. “True” discourse is no more than a necessary illusion for

subjects to struggle for power. And it is important to understand that this struggle takes

place from inside the very discursive practice: we cannot reach “the” truth, for we are

always-already assigned a circumscribed subject position the moment we utter anything.

The author proposes that in order to analyze the will to power (and knowledge)

in discourse we must gradually build and define our analytical tools, in a practice he

calls “genealogical”. That is done according to demands and possibilities designed by

concrete, contextualized studies (Foucault 1997). Bringing our object of study to that

perspective, I believe that we need to better investigate and understand how the

discursive practices around contemporary legends frequently point out the issue of

veracity versus falsehood of the stories as being the key to those legends – as if these

depended exclusively on a scientific-objective verdict for their permanence. This is

actually about an investigation which implies the analysis of discursive practices in their

local knowledge dimension.

On Internet discussion lists dedicated to the transmission and discussion of

contemporary legends3, a great number of the posts refer specifically to the issue of

truth in/of/around the legends. We can often observe how the different interlocutors

3 I am particularly considering here the discussion forum hosted by the site www.snopes.com, which provided most of the corpus of my doctoral thesis on contemporary legends (unpublished).

struggle, by means of argumentation and supposedly authenticated scientific references,

to debunk the rumors or “proto-legends” and re-establish the factual order as soon as

those texts hit their electronic mailboxes. One must carefully examine how those

narratives build on the tension between the local, discontinuous (to use Foucault’s

terms) and unverified knowledge, on the one side, and the hierarchical force of true

knowledge on the other – true knowledge that, once available to all by means of the

rational-logical apparatus of science, is taken as something “revealed” or “explained” by

the discourse of “those few” who possess it.

But, at this point, we had better not lose track of Foucault’s reminder that there

does not exist a mere division between admitted and excluded discourse, or between

dominant and dominated discourse. There is no discourse of power on the one side, and

that against power on the other. Rather, in a given discursive practice, we often observe

a co-relation of forces, a multiplicity of different power/knowledge strategies that

coexist. And it is that distribution of forces which we are to detect in the analysis: the

play between the things that are said and those that are unsaid or banned from discourse;

the variables and distinct effects depending on whoever speaks, when, from which

subjective/power position, and within which institutional context; the relocation and

reformulations of identical forms for opposite reasons.

We must, after all, acknowledge the existence of “a complex and unstable play

in which discourse can be at once instrument and effect of power, and also obstacle,

anchor, point of resistance and point of departure for an opposite strategy” (Foucault

1976/1999: 96, my translation). That would allow us to explain the fact that there can be

distinct and even contradictory discourses within the same strategy, or even discourses

that circulate unchanged amid opposite strategies.

4. Rorty and a Pragmatist Approach to Truth

Pragmaticians are philosophers of a predominantly Anglo-Saxon tradition to

whom knowledge is a tool, an instrument that must be put to the service of the

conditions of experience. One of the basic principles of pragmatism – shared by the its

major representatives, from William James to Richard Rorty, with John Dewey and

Donald Davidson inbetween – is anti-representationalism: the idea that there is not a

world “out there”, a reality independent from thought which may be represented by

language in a relation of correspondence or correctness. An idea which, as has been

pointed out, was already present in Nietzsche.

The same holds for the notion of truth, which, already in the first pragmaticians,

appears as dissociated from the idea of the representation of things of reality. The focus

is now on experience, the way people relate to reality. According to this line of thought,

truth cannot be correspondence to reality, but rather the contingent product of relations

that humans establish with each other by usage or, in Wittgensteinian terms, “language

games”. In other words, “being true” is not a property which is external to language, a

predicate of things in the world “out there”, but rather a fundamentally linguistic device,

a predicate of phrases, sentences or propositions.

Richard Rorty, the most outstanding name in current pragmatist philosophy,

formulates the questions in the following terms:

“To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that

where there are no sentences, there is no truth, that

sentences are elements of human languages, and that

human languages are human creations. Truth cannot be

out there – cannot exist independently of the human mind

– because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The

world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.

Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The

world on its own – unaided by the describing activities of

human beings – cannot”. (Rorty 1989: 11)

This reflection leads Rorty to wonder whether truth even deserves philosophical

inquiry as a relevant and unquestionable concept in itself. He questions the utility for

human society of insisting on formulating a theory of truth, a consistent body of

thought that may account for a concept which, after all, pervades all the transcendental-

metaphysical-epistemological problematic, from Plato to Heidegger, and which

continues to confound and obscure philosophical thought – including that of his

precursors, like James and Dewey. Instead, claims Rorty, philosophical thought should

set out to describe the conditions in which “the true” presents itself in linguistic

behaviors, that is, in contingent practices where people do things with language.

What Rorty values the most in the pragmatist tradition is his precursors’

vocation – notwithstanding their differences and divergences – to shift the focus away

from questions like “What in the world is true” to questions like “How is the word

‘true’ used?” (Rorty 1991/1999: 132) or, simply, to consider the issue of truth in

language in performative terms, highlighting the necessarily public and therefore social

nature of language.

That is how, rather than proposing a theory of truth, Rorty sets out to identify

the linguistic uses of the words “truth” and “true”, thus establishing the following

criteria (Rorty op. cit: 128):

1) Endorsing use: that in which speakers explicitly evaluate their speech as being true,

or as expressing something they consider to be true – through markers such as “it’s

obvious that”, “that’s true”, “certainly”, “no doubt”, etc.

2) Disquotational use: that in which the words of others are not necessarily endorsed by

the speakers – it involves recognizing the voice of the other, but putting it between

quotation marks.

3) Cautionary use: that which takes into account the distinction between truth and

justification – something may be justified (for example, “a government has no right to

steal people’s money”), but not true. To Rorty, it is not a difference in degree between a

“more profound”, or “hidden”, truth and an “apparent”, “superficial” one. It is actually

a question of equivalence: truth exists as long as it is justifiable, although, of course, the

justification may always be another, or several others, depending on the historical

moment, the locus of enunciation, the speakers, etc.

These criteria allow Rorty to more explicitly formulate his view of truth as

contingent and contextualized. In a sort of radical minimalism, what Rorty is telling us

is that “everything that can be said about X is what X is”, there not being to X an occult

or “intrinsic” side which eludes the relational apprehension of X through language. As

Ghiraldelli (2001: 118) points out, to Rorty truth cannot be discovered, for that would

be admitting that truth depends on “what the world is like” in the sense of causal

relations rather than descriptive acts.

Broadening this view towards a more specifically political formulation, Rorty

claims that, in an ideally liberal and democratic society, the notion of truth as

correspondence to reality should yield to an idea of truth as that which one comes to

believe in over free and open encounters. To the American philosopher, truth appears as

a historical contingency, and not as a convergence or a rational and universally valid

(even if uncoerced) communicative consensus, such as defended by thinkers the likes of

Jürgen Habermas (Hoy 1994). But does that mean that one should interpret Rorty’s

view as reducing truth to a mere pact, a fragile and capricious agreement between

“language players”?

In this connection, the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman could be called on to

our aid. He aligns himself with the pragmatist view by which truth, rather than

symbolizing the relation between what is said and a determined non-verbal reality,

“symbolizes in our usage a certain attitude we adopt, but above all wish and hope that

others will adopt, towards what is said or believed” (Bauman 1998: 142). However, he

insists on pointing out that, in certain beliefs, what is at stake is something more than

the use of truth as an endorsement, something that goes beyond mere approval. What is

at stake is the way these beliefs reach such a degree of certainty and confidence that

any alternative or opposing point of view is rejected.

According to Bauman, there is no sense in speaking of truth if not in a situation

of dissent. That is, truth only comes up as an issue when different people hold on to

different beliefs, making it the object of dispute on “who is right and who is wrong”. It

comes up when one claims the right to speak with authority, and when it becomes

particularly important for an adversary to prove that the other side of the dispute is

wrong. The struggle for truth represents, then, the struggle for establishing certain kinds

of beliefs as systematically superior, under the excuse that they have been reached at

through a realiable procedure, or that it is warranted by the kind of people who we trust

will follow those beliefs (Bauman op. cit.: 143).

The way I read him, Rorty would put this issue in other, maybe less

“ideological” terms. By explaining the relation between truth and justification – related

to the preventive use of truth discussed above –, the philosopher claims that the need to

justify our beliefs and desires to others and to ourselves subjects us to certain rules, the

obedience to which produces a pattern of behavior which we must detect in others

before we can confidently affirm that they hold this or that belief (Rorty 1998/2005: 14).

In other words, we enter the language game with certain beliefs, and we know

that those we play with possess, on their side, their own beliefs. But we must attest to

the existence of those beliefs performatively, from within the linguistic exchanges, and

not taken them as givens. What Rorty does not believe, perhaps unlike Bauman, is that

the rules of the linguistic game aim necessarily at obeying an additional order: the

command to search for the truth (Rorty op. cit.: 14)

What would Bauman be doing in his argumentation, then, if not rekindling the

flame of the will to truth, associated to the will to power, identified by Nietzsche and

Foucault? And, to keep to Rortian terms, what would those “certain and reliable” truths

be whose force Bauman warns us about, if not metaphors which, contingent at their

root, gradually grow literal?

5. The Lessons Philosophy Teaches Us About Contemporary Legends

Bringing our contemporary legends back into focus, we could but only begin, in

a tentative exercise of critical reading, to reassess the issue of truth as it manifests itself

in the practice of transmitting and commenting such narratives. Rather than taking to

the facile opposition between veracity vs. falsehood, which would imply a view of truth

as correspondence to a self-standing order of reality (i.e. the “facts”, the truth “out

there”), we would do best by using the lessons our philosophers have offered us in an

attempt to expand our common sense interpretation and see the discursive practice with

different eyes.

We could perhaps appreciate Heidegger’s lesson that everydayness – or rather,

situatedness – is the only social space we can be inhabit. If we live inauthentically,

negotiating our meanings through idle talk, ambiguity and curiosity, that is the only site

from within which we may eventually open ourselves up to a different, more

democratic “truth”. Becoming aware of the very space we speak from sounds like a

basic move, but definitely a first step (sometimes a very difficult one) that we as “mere

entities” can make towards critically reading our culture – legends, rumors, fictions,

and “objective” truths all included.

We could certainly retain Foucault’s critique of truth, particularly as it is

formulated in the following passage by Barry Allen, one of his commentators: [f]or

truth-value (and associated values like reference, translation, relevance, implication,

identity, and objectivity) to ‘be determinate’ in any case depends on the effectiveness of

historically contingent practices of evaluation, and on nothing else” (Allen 1995: 110-

1). This amounts to claiming that the difference between true and false cannot be

established by external, context-free parameters. It does not exist apart from a local

practice, in which these values are produced and evaluated and statements circulate as

true, presenting themselves in the form of facts, news, “legends” (legenda, i.e. “what is

to be read”). Allen continues: “Only here have statements currency, the capacity to

circulate, to penetrate practical reasoning, to be taken seriously, to pass for the truth.

These practical conditions situate truth amid all the major asymmetries of social power,

undermining its status as a common good” (Allen op. cit.: 4). Common good it is not,

then. Rather, it is a space for potential dissent, in which power relations will battle their

way towards either debunking or reaffirming the different stakes of the game.

Contemporary legends, more particularly the “practical conditions” – the local

practice – by which they are perpetuated function as the stage where a number of partial

“truths” gain their currency. In other words, they are the space where different regimes,

or programs of truth are enacted. Believing or not in certain accounts, in this or that

version of a specific contemporary legend, implies more than a one-track pursuit of

factual truth. It more likely involves a permanent shift between modes of belief – a shift

that is not unlike that which Paul Veyne (1983) identifies in the relation between the

Greeks and their myths.

Belonging to a “time long gone”, in all its wonders, its accounts of gods and

men – and fantastic creatures that one does not come across walking on the streets, at

least not in the “present” – myth offered itself to the Greeks as an integrally truthful

“reality”, one that transmits collective memories which could not have been simply

invented lies. As the author points out, believing in that body of narrative as a plausible

one means “still being within the true”, but in analogical terms. Myth is inherited

information. It is an accepted tradition. And it is respected. Once the story is over, we

can shift to another mode of truth – that of “real life” – and then back and forth, in an

analogical operation.

One may criticize myth from within a historian’s program of truth – rejecting

the chronological incoherences and the improbable cause-and-effect propositions – but

one may also be compelled to read allegorical truths into it. “To the rationalist

condemnation of the imaginary as false, the apologetic of the imaginary replies that it

conforms to a hidden reason. For it is not possible to lie” (Veyne 1983: 62). By

claiming that truth and interest – which I equate with (ever-partial) interpretation – are

inseparable instances, Veyne echoes Foucault. Both would agree that in the process of

attempting to fixate the meanings of a practice in a regime/program of truth,

contingency becomes a necessity that keeps justifying itself. And, as we have seen with

Rorty, justifying is one more language game one plays with truth.

In that sense, could contemporary legends be some sort of modern-day myth? I

would argue that just as it is impossible to lie about myth, it may be impossible to lie

about urban legends. The resonance that a legend may have in a certain interpretive

community tends to be higher than the evidence that contests its veracity. Whether the

narrative is trustworthy or not, the impact that the force of its message may cause is not

necessarily greater or smaller. As Whatley and Henken well point out:

“[T]he evidence countering the veracity of a legend rarely carries the

weight that the legend does. (...) The impact a legend has on those telling

or hearing it may have little to do with whether the story is believed. (…)

What may be more important is the ‘truth’ that folklore conveys about the

attitudes, fears, and beliefs of a goup, which in turn shape and maintain

the identity of that group.” (Whatley and Henken 2001: 4-5)

So, people may not believe, for example, that someone could have planted an

HIV-infected needle on their theater seats, but this will not necessarily stop them from

double-checking before sitting. Equally, they may not believe that the long-lasting use

of their cell phones poses any risk of explosion, but still they will turn off their devices

when pulling into a service station. That is, the most relevant aspect to this kind of

narrative may not be its “objectively attested” implausibility, but rather the “truth” it

reveals about the beliefs and values of the communities in which it circulates.

Finally, we might stick with a lesson that Veyne indirectly teaches us about the

myths of “our present time”, and that somehow paves the way toward a more critical

understanding of our object here. What he says about myth serves just as well for

contemporary legends: in order to engage those narratives we would do well by sorting

through the heterogeneous programs of truth that constitute our imagination – programs

that “tell” us what we are or are not allowed to believe at different moments in history;

programs that intersect or even contradict each other in our everyday, ever-shifting

contingent practices of being “in the true”. And so, “at each moment, nothing exists or

acts outside these [space-defining] palaces of the imagination... They are the only space

available” (Veyne 1983: 121).

6. This Elusive Thing Called Truth

Beyond the irreconcilable differences between the different theories of truth

reviewed here, I believe they all provide some points of reference for our discussion of

contemporary legends – particularly in regard to the question: what is truth such a

central issue in the discourse of and about those narratives? Perhaps the perspective I

have been trying to approach in the very writing of this article brings it closest to the

pragmatist approach, according to which knowledge is just as good as we can make a

useful application of it. From this point of view, we could say that Heidegger,

Nietzsche, Foucault, Rorty and Veyne complement each other – not in an

“evolutionary” manner, as in continual progressive line from one author to the other, but

rather as in an intersection of certain common points across different philosophical

programs of truth on truth.

Looking retrospectively, all theories propose the abandonment of the notion of

truth as absolute correspondence between the world and its representation, between

words and things. We will also find that the question of truth is inseparable from a

reflection on the (human) practices of daily life, in which people do things with

language. These practices may be seen, with Heidegger, as errancy or as an illusion, as

by Nietzsche. They may be seem, with Veyne, as a sort of program, or “constitutively

imaginary frame of mind” where different beliefs find a place in an analogical operation

They may also be seen, with Foucault, as struggle and resistance practices within a

regime of truth which mobilizes knowledge and engenders power. Or they may be seen,

with Rorty, as a forum for the creation and consolidation of contingent beliefs, resulting

from open and democratic free encounters. But all of them will agree that such practices

are necessary, in that they constitute the human mode of existence.

Thus, erring, according to Heidegger, is being immersed in a universe in which

the ready-at-hand things, inasmuch as they are apprehended in their relation with men,

become instrumental. Sure, Heidegger sees there the very operating mode of the entity

in its forgetfulness of Being. But it is precisely this immersion in half-blind, always

partial everydayness that interests us here, more than a supposed “forgotten essence”.

In Nietzsche, for his turn, it is the illusion of taming reality through language –

language that is always-already metaphorical, but which stalls the movement of

metaphor through forgetfulness, letting it perish – that allows men to survive in his

illusion of identity, rationality: his belief of “lasting truths”.

Along the same lines, Foucault will tell us that the discursive practices tend to

rarify discourse: inasmuch as discourses proliferate, they are subject to a regime of truth

which restricts it, limiting its chance occurrence and therefore wearing it thin. That is,

discourses affirm themselves as truthful, but they only do so within a (practical) order

that encourages its proliferation just as it simultaneously holds back its expansion, in a

mechanism that is characteristic of and necessary to the correlation of power/knowledge

forces.

In common between Nietzsche and Foucault is the proposition that truth is not a

universal given ready to be revealed, but rather the result of human action: an

interpretive – always partial – construction of reality, which takes place via language

and in the form of a will to truth.

Finally, Rorty (and in a similar fashion, Veyne), by desacralizing the idea of

truth as something intrinsic to things, places his bet on things that humans do with

language, in the contingent use of vocabularies which may only affirm themselves as

truths as a result of historically and socially situated practices.

To conclude, we might add that, in view of these theoretical grounding, the

search for the truth in/of contemporary legends points to two interrelated aspects. The

first one is that one cannot possibly learn all the “facts” (and therefore “all the truth”)

narrated in these stories. That is, one cannot know with absolute certainty what is a

technically or scientifically attested fact and what is merely an insisting rumor or piece

of misinformation – and I think here particularly of the abundant narratives surrounding

the “mysterious” powers of (not so) new technologies, or the risks of (as of yet)

uncontrollable diseases. Thus, we err; we cling to our most “essential” and “mundane”

truths: that we are all exposed to the pettiest everyday risks, and that one day we will all

die. The second aspect is that, albeit incomplete, controversial or merely “plausible”,

facts only make sense inasmuch as they belong to a program of truth, i.e., they are

mediated by a regime of discursive practices that have narrative as a privileged form of

manifestation – narratives of a particular type, dispersed and mutable, such as the

contemporary legend, but also other narratives of a particular type, those claimed by

the legitimized institutions of power/knowledge known as science, politics, the media,

etc. So as to make the most out of these reflections in our critical reading of

contemporary legends, we could reconcile those two aspects in the form of a dialectic

tension: one by which the will to truth in legends simultaneously constitutes a form of

self-regulation and fictional recreation, via narrative, of the fears, anxieties and

apprehensions of everyday life.

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