When Truth Is at Stake: 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)

Introduction

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

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

habitués are getting doped at 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 diners 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 in case 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 fearing for the health of their brains, which might well be exposed to the

risk of long-term damage, or even cancer. Are any of these stories true? Are we justified

in dreading them?

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

popularly named, urban legends1. That is all this is about. A (not so) modern form of

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

fears and apprehensions involving contamination, violence, death… But is that all there

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

1 The terms “urban” and “contemporary” are both commonly used in folklore bibliography. But they both present problems. The former has become popular partly due to the American scholar Jan Harold Brunvand’s collections and encyclopedias published since the early 1980s. Some authors, however, reject the term claiming that the stories are not restricted to an urban context. In turn, “contemporary”, the term preferred by authors such as Bill Ellis and Gillian Bennett and ratified by the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research – which was created in the early 1990s (Fine 1992: 1) –, could lead to the false impression that the stories are always recent, when actually many of them are rooted in long-lasting traditions. Still, in favor of this latter term there is the idea that any narrative is perceived as contemporary in the time it circulates (Ellis 2001: xiii). I use both alternatives along this article but I privilege the latter, despite its limitations.

In this article I wish to argue that contemporary legends are texts just as worth

bringing into the language class as other “semi-fictional”, “semi-factual” narratives that

have become staple didactic genres. My experience with students of English as a foreign

language – particularly those with a greater familiarity with Internet pop culture –

shows that these narratives elicit a great deal of controversy and debate. However, these

hardly take place in a critical manner, since the discussions often get polarized into a

dispute of whether the “facts” do or do not “actually occur”. I believe that a Critical

Literacy perspective would have a lot to contribute to these discussions in the sense that

it would provide both teachers and students with a practice through which they would

be able to question their own naturalized conceptions of culture and truth. It would help

us think of the power relations, discourses, and identities being constructed and

reinforced through these texts (Shor 1999). It would eventually help us see those texts

as embedded in broader meaning-making practices in which the fear of Others in our

social relations can take on many forms, and that contemporary legends is just one of

those forms (a potent one, I would say) whereby received interpretations and

stereotypes of alterity are enacted. We might then be able to recognize that since texts

are constructed representations of reality and of identities, we as critical readers “have a

greater opportunity to take a more powerful position with respect to those texts – to

reject them or construct them in ways that are more consistent with [our] own

experiences in the world” (Cervetti et al. 2001: 8).

In order to shed a light on – and begin to question – the assumptions that

underlie the commonplace discussions on contemporary legends such as I have been

able to observe in my own teaching practice, I draw here upon some philosophical and

critical theory grounding on the problem of truth that should allow us to understand why

such debate is so pervasive. It is my hypothesis that by critically looking into this

“moving force” of the debate we may be able to better understand how and why those

stories keep being reinvented, then sent and re-transmitted, over and over, whether or

not they are perceived as having actually taken place somewhere, at some point in time.

My focus will be, then, on this powerful – if elusive – thing called truth.

When one looks at contemporary legends one cannot actually avoid the issue of

truth that surrounds them. It may appear explicitly in the very proposition of the

narrative, in which the narrator claims 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, implausibility – of such reports. No matter how plausible

these might seem.

I would join Foucault (1971/1996; 1976/1999; 1979/1996) 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. 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” versus “this one actually did not – unless we

consider the fact that legends are transmitted within socially and historically situated

practices in which certain programs of truth are at stake.

Speaking of programs 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 Enlightenment – with Descartes at the forefront. It

is only in the late 18th century that this view will begin to be seriously questioned; and

later with Nietzsche, and throughout the 20th century, systematically challenged. A short

genealogy of this reviewed approach to truth in philosophy is what I set out to do in the

following sections. For that task, and to back my claim on the relevance of reading

contemporary legends, I turn to three major currents of critical thinking – themselves

discontinuous regimes of (philosophical) truth – which share the aim of deconstructing

the belief that truth is one and unique. The three currents are, namely: Heidegger’s

theory of truth as non-truth (errancy), Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s view of truth as will to

power (and hence will to truth), and the pragmatist conception of truth as a language

tool, 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.

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 drawing on one of its many possible threads:

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

off by proposing the 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

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 beginning with Platonism 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 in between – philosophical thought would posit 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 idealistic 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, favoring it over the concrete living entity. Aristotle, in his

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

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

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

nature of things. In the Roman period, characterized by the rise of the concept of

empire, Platonism began to give way to the notion of correction. Being truthful meant

having the correct, fair view of reality. From modernity, fundamentally with Descartes,

the entity was hoisted up to the condition of cognoscent subject, the supreme being to

whom all knowledge and all truth were conditioned. Truth then became 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 – stood 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 in nostalgia, but rather as a sort of revelation of

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

which metaphysics set out to obscure to the full, 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 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 (1999: 2) points out, the view that

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

philosophy, throughout its history, and is enmeshed into our quotidian self-knowledge.

Man is already born with a certain call for ontology, alternating between the

understanding he has of himself as being part of a universe of things ready-at-hand –

things which only exist because they serve a function or which relate to man in an

instrumental way – and the opening up to a set of “more abstract” questions that

accompany him throughout life, including: “What does being mean?” and “What is

truth?”. What occurs is that man is so absorbed by everydayness that he tends to abstract

things as lost in an impersonal collectivity, acting as a mere being-among-things and

moving away from authenticity.

When man is immersed in this everydayness (and this is a point which more

closely interests us here), he engages in “inauthentic” activities, such as curiosity,

ambiguity and idle talk (rumors included), which are, according to Heidegger, modes 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 for 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 inescapably 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 truth2 comes to place. To Heidegger, truth is inseparable from the Being

that unveils it. It exists necessarily as a function of Dasein, for once man searches for

self-understanding, he opens himself up to the unveiling of truth.

It might seem at first that Heidegger hardly moves away 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, for Heidegger the origin and anchor of all knowledge is fundamentally

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

others. Relational being. Awareness, for the philosopher, is not of a subjective nature,

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 errancy as 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. 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 – a condition

of possibility – and as such, “the human being presents him/herself as the yardstick for

all propositions referring to contingent situations where there is truth or falsity” (Stein

2 Heidegger uses the concept of aletheia, the word used by the Greeks’ mythical-poetic tradition to refer to truth, which literally means “unveiling”.

1993: 191, my translation). In fact, for Heidegger, it is in technology and in the modern

knowledge of science that the zenith of that metaphysics occurs, whereby the entity is

taken to be the reference for all things.

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

condemned to errancy – understood not as the mere accidental or isolated mistake, but

rather the domain of the history of those entanglements in which all types or errors get

caught (Heidegger 1930/1961, section 7). 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, at its root, 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 historical man’s errancy – that is,

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

everyday life.

Even then, in one more demonstration of this dialectical thinking which looks to

eliminate the facility of binary logics, Heidegger reminds us that if man can experience

this errancy as errancy, and not simply let himself be absorbed by it, he may guide

himself towards essential truth3.

So, as we have seen, Heidegger tries to break away 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

claims when he speaks of trace. For 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. “[W]e 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 1967/1989: 152). Each specific

borrowing brings to surface (or bears the trace of) a whole web of meanings from

which it is taken. It is in this sense that Heidegger, although denying the possibility of

the discovery of an absolute truth, is still talking about an original truth. It is in this 3 Waelhens and Biemel (1948: 55) point out that dialectics is a hallmark of Heidegger’s philosophy. But unlike Hegel’s dialectics, which aims at subsuming the oppositions into a higher synthesis, Heidegger’s dialectics presents the oppositions as definitely unresolvable – which, in any case, 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’.

sense that, while speaking of truth and non-truth as dialectically constitutive elements of

that essence of truth, he is still talking about truth in terms of presence.

Nietzsche and Foucault: Truth as Will

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

as knowledge of the world as it is. He 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, the German philosopher proposed that

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

give up on 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 tells us that knowledge is man’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, 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 one needed first to reject the object only then to bring it back to one’s domain,

already tamed, already molded. This implies that each and every form of knowledge,

including science and technology, 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)

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

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

fashion of arbitrary metaphors, which are nonetheless made 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

“man does not discover ‘truths’ independently from his will to power or his survival

instinct; he rather produces meanings and hence knowledge which is established through

the conventions that discipline man in social groups” (Arrojo 1992: 54, my translation).

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

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

allows himself to be tricked by the illusion of finding an ever-reinvented, particular 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 be told as true, when he sees an actor

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

to the ones Nietzsche proposes –, when receiving and transmitting urban legends over

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 illusory – 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 that is independent from human beings, truth

is proposed by Nietzsche as a way of meeting human desires, needs and uncertainties. It

is a value among values.

If for Nietzsche, then, every form of knowledge – and, consequently, every form

of truth – is necessarily perspective, it becomes 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.

But is Nietzsche contradicting himself – as he has often been accused of – by

proposing another truth when truth itself is nowhere to be found? I would argue he is not.

He could be defended against that claim when he affirms that, in order for us to go on

living, we must preserve certain classifying categories (which language consolidates) not

because they correspond to the nature of things, but simply because they give us the

necessary illusion of knowledge. It is from this point of view that we can interpret, for

instance, 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 a creative nature, which would occur as the result of an explicit account of

the metaphorical origin of words and truth” (Mosé 2005: my translation) or, in other

terms, a proposition for a rediscovery of “[those] ‘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 – 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 refer now 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 viewed in connection 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 vary, 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 undergone 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 to question it against truth” (Foucault 1971/1996: 20, my translation).

It can already be noted that truth is not produced as an autonomous mistake-free

organism, 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 1976/1999: 28-9, my translation)

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 enter

discourse.

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 in keeping with demands and possibilities designed

by concrete, contextualized studies (Foucault 1997). Bringing our object of study into

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

discursive practices around contemporary legends often point to the issue of veracity vs.

falsehood of the stories as being the “key” to those legends – as if the accounts

depended exclusively on scientific-objective verdicts for permanence. Such investigation

would imply the analysis of discursive practices in their local knowledge dimension.

On Internet discussion lists dedicated to the transmission and discussion of

contemporary legends4, a great number of posts refer specifically to the issue of truth

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

by means of argumentation and supposedly legitimate scientific references, to debunk

the rumors or “proto-legends”, and re-establish the factual order as soon as those texts

hit their e-mail boxes. It is as if proving the stories false were the raison d’être of the

discursive practices – the “moving force of the debate”, as I suggested earlier. Indeed,

one must carefully examine how those narratives build on the tension between the local,

discontinuous (in 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 for something

“revealed” or “explained” by the discourse of those “select 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

discourse 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 co-exist. 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

4 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).

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.

Rorty and the Pragmatist Approach to Truth

We move now to our next stop on our journey through the realm of

philosophical truth: pragmatism. 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 its major representatives, from William James to Richard Rorty, with John

Dewey and Donald Davidson in between – is antirepresentationalism: the idea that

there is not a world “out there”, a reality independent from thought which might 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 with the first

pragmaticians, appears as dissociated from the idea of representation of things of reality.

The focus here is 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 through 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: 5)

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 might 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 philosophers. Instead, Rorty claims,

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: 132) or, simply, to consider the issue of truth in language in

performative terms, highlighting the necessarily public and hence 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 acknowledging 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. For 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, 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. For

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 be replaced by an idea of truth as what one comes to

believe over free and open encounters. For 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 the likes of

Habermas (Hoy 1994). But does that mean one should take 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 whereby truth, rather than

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

“stands in our usage for a certain attitude we take, but above all wish or expect others to

take, to what is said or believed” (Bauman 1997: 112). 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. 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”. Truth

comes up when one claims the right to speak with authority, or 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 reliable procedure, or one that is “vouched for by the kind of people who may

be trusted to follow it” (Bauman op. cit.: 113).

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 cautionary 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 norms,

the obedience to which “produces a behavioral pattern which we must detect in others

before we can confidently attribute beliefs to them” (Rorty 1998: 26).

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

the rules of the linguistic game necessarily imply obeying “an additional norm – the

commandment to seek a [final] truth” (Rorty op. cit.: op. cit.).

Reading Legends, Reading Myths: The Lessons Theory Teaches Us

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 those narratives. Rather than taking to

the facile opposition between veracity versus 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 – and

eventually applying them in our language classes – in an attempt to reassess our

common sense interpretations and view 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 it is definitely a first step (sometimes a very difficult one) that we as

“mere entities” can take towards critically reading our culture’s artifacts – 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” in 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 the one Paul Veyne (1983) identifies in the complex relation the Greeks held

with 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 transmitted collective memories which could not have been simply

invented lies. As Veyne 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 concepts, Veyne echoes Foucault. Both would agree that in the process of

attempting to fix 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, as

has been hinted at in our Introduction? 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 or not the narrative is trustworthy, 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 group, which in turn shape and maintain

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

So, our students 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 to say, 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 in point. 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).

This Elusive Thing Called Truth

It is my belief that beyond the irreconcilable differences between them, the

different theories of truth reviewed here provide some points of reference for our

discussion of contemporary legends – particularly in regard to the question of why truth

is such a central issue in the discourse of and about those narratives. Perhaps the

perspective I have been trying to adopt in the very writing of this article brings it closest

to the pragmatist approach, whereby 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 a continual progressive line from one author to the next, but rather as in an

intersection of certain common points across different philosophical programs of truth

on truth.

In retrospect, 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 a form of errancy or, with Nietzsche, as an

illusion. They may be seen, with Veyne, as the enactment of a program, or

“constitutively imaginary frame of mind”, where different beliefs play out in analogical

operations. 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 very mode of human 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 man,

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 flow of metaphor

through forgetfulness, thereby letting it perish – that allows men to survive in their

illusion of identity and rationality: their belief in “lasting truths”.

Along the same lines, Foucault tells us that discursive practices produce a sort of

rarefaction: inasmuch as discourse proliferates, it is subject to a regime of truth which

restricts it, limiting its chance occurrence and thus “wearing it thin”. Discourse affirms

itself as truthful, but it only does so within a (practical) order that encourages its

proliferation just as it simultaneously detains its expansion, in a mechanism that is

characteristic of and necessary to the correlation of power/knowledge forces.

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.

By now, agents and advocates of Critical Literacy will surely have identified in

all those discussions one of the tenets of their own belief system, summarized by

Cervetti et al. (2001: 10) in these terms: “Reality cannot be know definitely, and cannot

be captured by language; decisions about truth, therefore, cannot be based on a theory

of correspondence with reality, but must instead be made locally”. Locally in the

different interpretive communities we claim membership to; locally in our classrooms,

as we and our students learn to rethink the often deeply ingrained assumptions we hold

on the meaning of truth, and on what can or cannot be true about the stories we are told.

To conclude our journey, then, we might just add that in view of our theoretical

(and practical!) grounding the search for the truth of/in contemporary legends leads us

along the routes of two intersecting tracks. The first one shows us that we cannot

possibly learn all the “facts” – and hence “all the truth” – narrated in these stories. That

is, we cannot know with absolute certainty what is a technically, scientifically attested

(or even plausible) 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. We simply err; we cling to our most “essential” and

“mundane” truths: that we are all exposed to too-close-to-home risk, and that someday

we will all die. The second track teaches us that, albeit incomplete, controversial or

merely plausible, facts only make sense insofar as they belong to an “itinerary of truth”.

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

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

the legitimized institutions of power/knowledge that go by the name of science, politics,

education, the media, etc. In short, all those narratives that make up the fabric of our

everyday engagement with reality.

So as to make the most out of these reflections in a critical stance towards

contemporary legends, we could perhaps draw the map of those two tracks in the form

of a dialectic sway: one by which the will to truth in legends simultaneously constitutes

a form of social regulation and fictional reinvention, via narrative, of the fears and

anxieties of daily life. Positioning ourselves as teachers and learners who can perceive

and critically read this dialectics will hopefully have been the result of a dialogic

practice: a continual, ever-transitory – but not a bit elusive – exercise in critical literacy.

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