International Journal on Criminology Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 2018 | Page 52

International Journal on Criminology • Volume 6, Number 1 • Spring 2018
Syria: An Epistemological Obstacle
Richard Labévière
Knowledge of reality is a light that always casts a shadow in some
nook or cranny. It is never immediate, never complete. Revelations
of reality are always recurrent. Reality is never ‘what we might believe
it to be’: it is always what we ought to have thought. Empirical
thought is clear in retrospect, when the apparatus of reason has been
developed. Whenever we look back and see the errors of our past,
we discover truth through a real intellectual repentance. Indeed, we
know against previous knowledge, when we destroy knowledge that
was badly made and surmount all those obstacles to spiritualisation
that lie in the mind itself.
—Gaston Bachelard, The Formation of the Scientific Mind, trans.
Mary McAllester Jones (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2002), 24.
In using the term “civil-global” to describe the war that has raged in Syria since
summer 2011, the most clear-sighted political commentators are attempting to
deconstruct—in order to understand its rationality—the various dimensions
of one of the most atypical post-Cold War conflicts of the twenty-first century.
Not only does this war of a new kind compress different layers of conflict, and not
only is it changing the conventional nature of war and terrorist threats, but it is
also producing discourse, representations, ideas and positions that defy the most
classical methods of humanities research, even research period, and traditional
diplomatic practices and customs.
More than any other recent conflict, this civil-global war has produced multiple
strands of discourse—symptomatic manifestations of a so-called “post-truth,”
“post-factual,” or “fake news” era—resulting from interactions between politics,
non-governmental organizations, and the contemporary media.
As for the so-called “social networks,” products of the new technological
tools of the internet, they do not produce new social practices but rather generate
greater social atomization of individuals disconnected from reality. They have
imposed themselves as the primary “post-truth” actors, contributing fully to the
“disruptive” impact of a digital revolution that has spread across the globe in an
authoritarian manner. Not a master conspiracy, but a process without a subject, as
Louis Althusser might have described it, that follows the logic of pursuing dematerialized,
virtual, and globalized profit.
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doi: 10.18278/ijc.6.1.4