Steve Bannon described his media strategy in a 2018 interview as "flooding the zone with shit." The phrase is crude, and it is also precise. You do not need to lie if you can destroy the conditions under which lies are distinguishable from truth. You do not need a better argument if you can make argument itself seem like a performance. The goal is not to win the epistemic competition. The goal is to cancel it.
Sixty years earlier, tobacco industry strategists wrote a memo that read: "Doubt is our product." Different industry, same move. Manufacture uncertainty. Contest the authority of official knowledge. Insist that the science is not settled, that experts have interests, that the institution producing the consensus is itself a power structure and therefore suspect. These men were not reading Foucault. They were not interested in the genealogy of knowledge-power. They were selling cigarettes. But the epistemological operation they were running is structurally identical to what a generation of left-wing theorists built into the foundations of academic humanistic inquiry — the insistence that claims to objective truth are always also claims to power, and that the neutral observer is always already a situated one.
This is the problem that nobody wants to own.
Habermas identified the formal version of this problem in 1985 and called it a performative contradiction. If you use rational argument to demonstrate the illegitimacy of rational argument, you have quietly presupposed the thing you are dismantling. You cannot issue a credible critique of the standards of credibility without invoking them. The postmodern response is that Habermas's own communicative rationality is historically situated and therefore not universal — which is a move that works only if you are allowed to assert it as, in some sense, true.
Michel Foucault is the figure who makes this concrete, because he lived it at the largest possible scale of contradiction. He spent his career demonstrating that every regime of truth is an instrument of domination, every claim to objectivity an exercise of power in disguise, every liberatory discourse a new form of discipline. Then in 1978 he traveled to Iran and filed dispatches celebrating Khomeini's movement as a "political spirituality," a genuinely new form of collective life breaking free of Western disciplinary grids. He was wrong in a way that his own framework should have made impossible — or should have made inevitable, depending on how you read it. If all disciplinary power is equally suspect, then the power doing the suspecting is just your own situated preference dressed as theory. The framework had no mechanism for distinguishing Khomeini from the Shah except Foucault's feelings about Khomeini. In his last years, before he died in 1984, Foucault turned to parrhesia — the ancient Greek practice of frank, unembellished truth-telling as a philosophical virtue. He spent his final lectures praising courageous honesty as an ethical ideal. You are allowed to find this moving. You are also allowed to notice what it means.
The symmetry that David Harvey identified in 1989 from the Marxist left — that postmodernism's celebration of fragmentation and its hostility to grand narratives is structurally useful to capital's shift toward flexible accumulation — found its mirror image on the actual right. Alain de Benoist's GRECE think tank, a far-right organization, adopted Foucauldian anti-universalism to argue that liberal human rights norms were a Western cultural imposition. The argument is structurally identical to the one made by postcolonial and feminist theorists against Enlightenment universalism. The political destination is the opposite. If the epistemological premise is sound, there is no lever inside the theory to determine which application is legitimate.
Richard Rorty knew this and accepted it with unusual honesty. His liberal ironist holds deep progressive political commitments while fully acknowledging that these commitments have no universal or metaphysical grounding — they are contingent historical inheritances, ethnocentric through and through, with "no universality other than the transient and unstable one which time, luck, and discursive effort might win for it." Rorty spent his later career arguing strenuously for left politics using a framework that gives those politics no privileged claim to truth. He seems to have believed this was stable. Scholars tracing the line from his anti-foundationalism to Kellyanne Conway's "alternative facts" are being neither unfair nor ungenerous. They are reading the framework as written.
Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway documented the tobacco strategy with admirable precision in Merchants of Doubt, working from within the history and sociology of science. Critics within that same tradition noted that science studies — the field that produced Oreskes and Conway — also produced much of the institutional legitimacy of "doubt" as a scholarly instrument. This is not an attack on Oreskes and Conway. It is a description of an inheritance that the left-wing academy has not yet finished accounting for.
What nobody gets to do is use the critique when it targets your enemies' knowledge claims and then declare it suspended when it reaches your own. The tobacco lawyer and the Foucauldian theorist are not allies and do not know each other. But they have been, for sixty years, pulling on the same thread. At some point the people who started the pulling are responsible for what unravels.
Nietzsche's line — "there are no facts, only interpretations" — was a private notebook entry aimed at positivism, never intended for publication. It is now treated as a foundational postmodern thesis, cited as a stable, decontextualized fact about what Nietzsche believed. The irony is not subtle. But irony has never stopped anyone from flooding a zone.