Abstract
Post-truth is a most popular topic these days. The way these books approach this topic, reminds us of Karl Polanyi's ‘double movement’ or the idea, discussed in his classic, ‘The Great Transformation’, that capitalism disrupts society and triggers societal self-defence in the form of collective identities that, however, like in fascism and bolshevism, before too soon start playing a detrimental role to democratic freedoms.
Like Polanyi's masterpiece, these works seek to understand a crisis that exhibits the distinctive feature of a ‘structural’ crisis: a point of no return beyond which we will live in a world radically different from the one we used to know. But while Polanyi focused on the crisis of the political economy of ‘Nineteenth-century civilization’, these books engage with post-truth and nothing less than the crisis of the real. However, they do this in rather different ways.
In search of a political theory to address the crisis of the real
The book by Kalpokas seeks to formulate a political theory of post-truth. The collection of essays edited by Overell and Nicholls questions the notion itself, and the socio-political and cultural rationale for its popularity. The key difference in the way these two books address the challenge of post-truth is not methodological but epistemological: it has to do not so much with the nature or the effects of post-truth but with the nature of the relationship between truth and reality. As I will argue later on in the essay, Kalpokas searches for a political theory to address a crisis whereas Overell and Nicholls question the nature of the crisis itself.
The book by Kalpokas is organized into five chapters, including introduction and conclusion.
In the ‘Introduction’, Kalpokas explains that his discussion about the theory of post-truth is political in the sense that Michael Freeden gives to this term in The Political Theory of Political Thinking (2013). Relying on Freeden's idea that the political is ultimately the field of contested concepts that need to be ‘decontested’ (p. 3), Kalpokas argues that a political theory of post-truth is political in the sense of ‘de-contesting’ the concept of post-truth. This means showing that ‘post-truth narratives come into play’, supplanting the ‘inconclusiveness, contingency, indeterminacy, and plurality’ of political life ‘with a fantasy of mastery and coherence, endowing the world with seemingly undeniable sense and purpose’ (p. 4).
In the second chapter, ‘Post-truth: the condition of our times’, Kalpokas offers the reader a good review of the debate about post-truth and the link with the identity-building functions of this notion, to interpret post-truth as ‘co-created fiction in which the distinction between truth and falsehood has become irrelevant, the latter being replaced by affective investment in aspirational narratives’ (p. 9).
In the third chapter, ‘Enabling post-truth: mediatization and affect’, Kalpokas argues that mediatization enables the post-truth condition (p. 57) in so far as it allows the expression of affects associated with the ‘conatus', the notion Spinoza used to describe the fundamental drive in every living thing to ‘persevere in existence’ (p. 73). For Kalpokas, digitalization ultimately offers emotional rewards in a context where mediated social relations are unrewarding.
In the fourth chapter, ‘Making the Theory Political’, Kalpokas seeks to ‘decontest’ post-truth and its political saliency via two strategies of a narrative approach to mimesis and verisimilitude, and an interesting combination of postmodern relativism and Laclau (& Mouffe)'s analysis of the political functions of the ‘empty signifier’ (p. 109). The most important implication of this operation is presumably the idea that post-truth makes it possible ‘to enact the postmodern creed of the fall of metanarratives while simultaneously uniting a multiplicity of individuals as if there was such a metanarrative’ (p. 111).
In the last chapter, ‘Conclusion: for unto us post-truth is born’, Kalpokas effectively summarizes the arguments supporting the idea of ‘post-truth as co-created fiction’, designed to offer ‘customers satisfaction and user experience within a competitive truth market … within the broader context of mediatization’ (p. 123). The recurrent theme here is that of post-truth as personalized truth whose appeal is not dependent on its relations with actual facts but with the experience of widespread uncertainty associated with the ‘disintegration of information hierarchies and the empowerment of individual to choose their lifeworlds’ (p. 124). The problem that post-truth narrative is rather effectively addressing is not that of truth but that of meaning, or rather meaninglessness as ‘a key ordering and guiding tool, instructing actions and assigning functions in an otherwise largely amorphous and meaningless world’ (p. 130).
Questioning post-truth as a notion
The collection of essays edited by Rosemary Overell and Brett Nicholls contains nine chapters divided into three parts. The reader may find it bizarre that the ‘Foreword’ is included in the ‘Introduction’ as if ‘cut and paste’ by mistake. This aside, in this first chapter, the editors alert the reader's attention to the fact that the collection is inspired by a conjunctural analysis of the current ‘crisis of realness’ (p. 1). Following Stuart Hall, this analysis consists of the ‘identification of the contradictions that cumulate in moments deemed as ‘crisis’ by experts… and in the popular media’ (p. 4). The core idea that Overell and Nicholls suggest is intriguing: the concerns about post-truth and the crisis or the realness, rather than merely describing an unfortunate state of affairs, flag the epistemic (re)deployment of social forces concerned about their own future as the epistemic conditions supporting their power seem to be falling apart. The authors therefore ‘ask what it means to frame the real as “in crisis” in terms of its conjunctural possibilities in the face of hegemonic power’ and suggest to look at ‘the fervour with which this discourse around reality is articulated’ (p. 8), because, following Hall and others, the ‘ability to arbitrate and constitute “reality” is key to the maintenance and continuation of ideology’ (p. 7).
The essays in the rest of the collection are organized in three parts titled ‘Location’, ‘Crisis’ and ‘Symptom’. Part one contains four chapters that in different ways combine a conjunctural approach to post-truth with postmodernism and the work of one of its more popular representatives, Jean Baudrillard. In the second part, two chapters dissect the post-truth crisis with a critique of ‘fact-checking’ as a misplaced strategy to tackle its reactionary tendencies and a discussion of the epistemic centrality of racism associated with them. Part three concludes the collection with two essays having in common the idea of ‘post-truth as surface phenomenon’ and as an ‘ideological conductor’ (p. 10), ultimately testifying for the productivity of Hall's approach to the crisis of our time.
In the first chapter of part one, ‘Fake President: telemorphosis and the performance of grotesque power’, Laurie Ouelette performs a conjunctural analysis of Trump's presidency through Baudrillard's notion of ‘State of Telemorphosis’ and Foucault's ‘grotesque sovereignty’. The first term describes the ‘collapse of the real in the age of reality TV’ (p. 17). The latter introduces the idea that since ‘a ‘technology of truth’ can be parodied and discredited, and still be impactful’ (p. 22), an analysis with the ambitions of supporting more productive antagonist practices should seek ‘to emphasize countertactics within a culture of post-reality, without losing sight of the grotesque nature of power in the twenty-first century’ (p. 18). The result is a classification of the ‘registers where reality television and its vexed relationship to the real have been appropriated, parodied and engaged to discredit Trump and question his authority…’ (p. 25). The main takeaway is ‘the possibility that staging governance as a TV show in which we are all called upon to play a part also opens up new registers and tactics for contesting Trump's performance as a ruler’ (p. 17).
Chapter 3, ‘White noise of desire’ by Cindy Zeiher, is presented in the Introduction as an analysis of two movies. The actual chapter, however, deals with only one, Giuseppe Tornatore's ‘The Best Offer’. Zeiher deploys a Lacanian approach to love and desire to argue that the technological mediation of the subject ‘both familiarises and defamiliarises us with our embodied lack and desire’ (p. 54). The main point is presumably a reminder that 21st-century technology is not there to fulfil our desire but to give them shape (an argument that reminds of ‘rendition’ in Zuboff's ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ (2019)). As the core topic of that discussion is the ‘reality’ of love rather than reality tout court, the reader may wonder if, for the purposes of conjunctural analysis, it would have been more useful to discuss the ‘reality’ of cinema itself.
In Chapter 4, ‘Postmodernism in the twenty-first century: Jordan Peterson, Jean Baudrillard and the problem of chaos’, Brett Nicholls explicitly engages with the ‘problem of the real’ and its ideological implications. The returns of postmodernism in the global North is interpreted as a ‘conjunctural sign’ connecting a number of disparate processes, consisting of ‘the continuing failure of Marxism…the decline of neoliberalism as a result of the financial crisis of 2008; the rise of new forms of conservative nationalism…the shift in the relationship between science and power…the mediatisation of social life…surveillance and social control… new forms of intersectional political struggle; and the strengthening of extreme conservative thought’ (p. 58). In the rest of the chapter, Nicholls rebukes Peterson's interpretation of Baudrillard as a misinterpretation, inspired by the ideological ambition of ‘recovering the real’ to resolve the threat that ‘meaninglessness’ and the ‘desert of the real’ represents for the capitalism and the ‘Global North’ (pp. 67–68). Ultimately, Postmodernism and the epistemic insights of Baudrillard, are still useful to debunk the ideological naturalization of the Western civilization.
Chapter 5, by Nina Cvar and Robert Bobnič, presents another editorial oddity. In the ‘Introduction’, its title was ‘Beyond Post-truth as Mediation: From Fascism and Neoliberalism to Fake News’. The actual chapter, however, is titled ‘Truth, Post-truth, Non-truth: New Aestheticized Digital Regime of Truth’ and, consists of a rather challenging discussion of key works by Stuart Hall, Shannon, Laruelle, Beller and others, leading the reader to the conclusion that ‘post-truth indicates a new type of aestheticization of the contemporaneity of the current neoliberal regime’ (p. 99). In this perspective, post-truth and fake news are interpreted as ‘a curious product of neoliberalism’ (p. 100) that, having survived the crisis of 2007–2008, seeks to preserve its grip through ‘the optimization of capitalist accumulation … normalizing financialization and further consolidating neoliberal governmentality’ but also through ‘a strange merger of neoliberal ideology intertwined with fascist tendencies, intensified by media technologized mediation’ (p. 99).
In the first chapter of the second part, ‘The reveal of the real: fact-checking and “not-tags” in the current juncture’, Overell applies a Lacanian approach to the problem of the real to address the limitation of the ‘reveal-of-the-real’ and the interpretation of ideology as ‘false consciousness’ (p. 109). The most interesting point of her analysis is the idea that ‘Lacan's Borromean knot’ or the impossibility of separating the Symbolic and the Imaginary from the Real (p. 122) constitute the grounds for a more effective understanding of the current conjuncture and, therefore for a more effective response against the reactionary tendencies associated with the political discourse of ‘fake news’ and post-truth.
In Chapter 7, ‘Veils of prejudice: race and class in the current conjuncture’, R. Harindranath surveys recent race scholarship by looking at the role of prejudice in ‘the current conjuncture’ and argues that ‘racism and racial prejudice [have] … contributed to patterns of exploitation, marginalisation and the processes of cultural, political and economic precaritisation’ (p. 132). The main point of the chapter is that ‘the racial basis of the current forms of authoritarian populism display features that Hall identified nearly forty years ago’: it is ‘an exceptional form of the capitalist state—which, unlike classical fascism, has retained most (though not all) of the formal representative institutions in place, and which at the same time has been able to construct around itself an active popular consent’ (p. 148).
In Chapter 8, the first chapter of the third part, ‘Pre-truth, post-truth and the present: Jacques Lacan and the Real Horror of contemporary knowledge’, Scott Wilson mobilizes the museal form of the Kammer and the Lacanian notions of Symbolic register and Master Signifier to challenge the idea that, before post-truth, ‘the possibilities for truth … were stable and equally available to all’ (p. 155). Wilson problematizes ‘post-truth’ as a condition of ‘indifference to truth’ and suggests that this condition renders irrelevant not only the content of truth ‘but also, and most crucially, the Symbolic structures that both authorize and profit from the conditions of truth remaining as they are’ (p. 172). In this perspective, the rise of post-truth poses a distinctive threat to the extent truth is shown ‘to operate at the whim of whoever has access to the power to make and continuously revise such statements regardless of fact’ and ‘the pan-subjective Symbolic is seen to be the subject of an individual Imaginary … which immediately prevents or forestalls the fantasies of others’ (p. 172).
In the concluding chapter, ‘Civility, subversion and technocratic class consciousness: Reconstituting truth in the journalistic field’, Olivier Jutel applies a Bordieuan approach to argue that Trump's mediatic ‘populist jouissance’ is a formidable challenge because it reintroduces the political defined, with Mouffe and Laclau, as ‘the affective and libidinal logics of antagonism which defy the normative, rational and strategic range of actions presupposed within a field’ (p. 180). By engaging Trump‘s populism on the terrain of truth, the response of journalism in the United States seeks to defend its own cultural capital by reactivating the Cold War apparatus of techno-social control with the addition of data journalism but falls short of engaging with the political.
By reading these books together, as different approaches to the same question, the reader will be in a better position to appreciate their relative merits and shortcomings. Kalpokas's examination of the distinctive symbolic, identitarian and imaginary functions of the post-truth condition is supported by useful reviews of the key scholarship on mediatization and representation. It is a rather accessible text that can also help the inexperienced reader to engage with post-truth and its political saliency. The main problem with Kalpokas's interpretation and development of a political theory of post-truth is the absence of ideology. This absence is especially conspicuous in relation to two key points. First, in the discussion of the condition of meaninglessness that allegedly feeds the political efficacy of post-truth narrative. Second, in relation to the ideological connotation of the movements supported by these narratives. Recurrently, throughout the text, when discussing the problems that have produced the condition for post-truth narrative to take hold and gain political influence, Kalpokas refers to arguments usually associated with the effects of capitalism and neoliberalism in these societies. Kalpokas, however, never mentions ‘capitalism’, ‘neoliberalism’ or even ‘ideology’ in the main text (‘capitalism’ recurs only three times and neoliberalism only one as titles of references). If post-truth is ‘co-created fiction’ enabled by mediatization, how not to question the political economy of the (social) media themselves that makes this ‘fiction’ politically relevant? The decontestation of post-truth turns out to be a tricky operation that addresses the ambivalence of political concepts outside, rather than within, the realm of ideology, as if ideology did not belong to the reality of politics.
Compared to Kalpokas's book, the collection by Overell and Nicholls engages more effectively with the ideological origins and effects of post-truth, and offers a more profound problematization of the relationship between reality and ideology. It is however also a far more testing reading for the uninitiated to the intricacies of the conjunctural approach and its ramifications, and clearly a text designed to address an implied audience already familiar with this tradition. This is a pity because, in the current ‘conjuncture’, the insights of this approach would be beneficial to a larger public.
Taken together, however, these are texts that will greatly help and are warmly recommended for all those who seek to understand some fundamental implications of the ‘post-truth condition’ for the future of democracy.