Truth, Poststructuralism, and Salsa Dancing

As a former philosophy student I couldn't resist wading into the big-T Truth debate. The history of philosophy is more or less a reflection of the debate that took place in class: a multitude of opinions, some of them interesting but, in the end, none more conclusive than the other. Conclusiveness is important: a lot of the time "Truth" (big-T) is used as a synonym for conclusiveness in so far as "Truth" is taken to be something that is the case everywhere and for all time. But if you asked someone the question 'is there anything that is the case everywhere and for all time?' you are bound to get answers that are wildly different than if you asked 'what is the Truth?'. Many of the responses that were elicited in class wouldn't really make sense if they were elicited in the context of the former question rather than the latter. So when Professor Grimes asked people about Truth what did they take the word "Truth" to mean? It seems that everyone has their own private definition. For me this is the key to the problem: the word 'Truth' has no referent, or has too many referents, and yet we make no effort to establish how we're using the word before we try to define it. In short, I think Truth is an utterly dysfunctional word that is loaded with so many associations and meaning for most people that using it only creates problems (and adresses none). The sooner we stop using it the sooner we can start discussing questions that are interesting and potentially meaningful.

Which brings me to Poststructuralism. Mentioned by Luker on page 34, Poststructuralism more or less takes the position that I present in the above paragraph: that there isn't really anything that is the case everywhere and for all time (and therefore, truth is relative and Truth irrelevant). But that's not to say that truth is entirely relative: rather, what one regards as being true is determined (or informed) by one's context: one's time and place, knowledge and beliefs, etc. Poststructuralism seems to be an essential component of the method proposed by Luker. As such, salsa dancing is a metaphor for the contextual awareness theorized by Poststructuralism, the same kind of situatedness required when dancing. Luker's list of associations with salsa dancing (page 3) include: "holistic," "attentive to context," "conceptually innovative," "methodologically agnostic," "socially embedded". One word I might add to this is dynamic: when I imagine a salsa dancing or a poststructuralist social researcher I imagine someone that is situated in a constantly changing environment but who has the dynamism required to constantly adapt themselves and their methods in accordance with the given environment; someone that can, in a sense, go with the flow.

And that's really all that Poststructualism is proposing: that the world is more like a dynamic salsa dance (or perhaps more like a packed dance club) than it is like a stable, well-rehearsed ball (you know, where all of the canonical sociologists hang out). Therefore, the pursuit of stable, static concepts such as Truth in a dynamic, poststructuralist world is a bit like trying to perform a very stuffy ballroom routine in a sweaty, surging club -- to do so is to ignore the rhythm of the time and place.