about appearances

Brian Taylor reminds the reader  in one of the notes in Responding to Men in Crisis that "Foucault’s later view was that the notion of a deep meaning behind appearances is an important mythic construction in modern power/knowledge".

We should remember this every time comments go like: "these are just words"; "words can do no harm"; "working class people put no meaning in what they are saying; there is something deeper behind those words" or the classic "first appearances are deceptive". I start to think that the whole idea of modernism is attached to this concept: there is always something more to be discovered behind what one perceives.