Productive Forces of Post-Truth(s)?

Abstract

Despite efforts to re-establish epistemological order, a litany of fake websites, media misrepresentation, “rumor bombs,” hoaxes, fake news, plagiarisms, and fabricated subjects document the emergence of a post-truth era. Increasing amount of scholarship is shared and distributed in media and thus the truth-value of (qualitative) inquiry also depends on the general discourses and practices operating in this contemporary post-truth era. Although critical thought is prized as the vehicle for advancing understandings, the scholarly literature does little to critically deconstruct the nature of post-truth(s) or question post-truth assumptions, to arrive at alternative conclusions and productive possibilities of our post-truth era. Following many poststructuralist thinkers, we then seek a deconstructive approach that first exposes and then subverts our implicit assumptions and dominant ways of thinking about truth, un-truth, and post-truth. In particular, we first consider broad conditions that shaped post-truth, while focusing on social media as a means and an ends to our obsession over “truth.” To destabilize post-truth assumptions, we then introduce mental comfort stories and critically question whether a pre-truth world ever existed. Next we discuss limitations of truth-regimes, academia, “truth” carnivals, and truth telling. Finally, we consider heterotopic spaces, such as social media, in leveraging onto-epistemological possibilities of post-truth era. To speak to the methodological audiences more broadly we call for a different space for (non)methodologies, theories, subjects, and objects in parallel flux with the complex, unpredictable, and increasingly dense post-truth world we live in.

Keywords

post-truth Academia qualitative inquiry methodology social media

Recently, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) declared “post-truth” as its 2016 international word of the year. In its press release announcing the word of the year, OED defines post-truth as “. . . relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion or personal belief” (see OED, 2016). This notion of post-truth offers not only theoretical, epistemological, and ontological challenges to knowledge, but it has also radically changed our lives not just as citizens but also as qualitative scholars perhaps best displayed through the functions of social media. Comprised of messy, ephemeral, and unbound intersecting relations of knowledge, power, and subjectivity, social media often yields unforeseen capacity for transformation and reinvention of all knowledges and beings including the scholarly ones. In other words, within this lived nexus of knowledge/power struggle and identity contention, ideas, beliefs, principles, and materialities can be shaped and reshaped. Social media, therefore, becomes one of the most fertile laboratories for exploring the productive possibilities of post-truth and scholarship within.

Scholars (see, for example, Mair, 2017; Sismondo, 2017) who have begun to investigate the rise of the post-truth moment have focused primarily on its sociopolitical aspects. They, in general, criticize it as “replacement truths” and repudiate the uses of technological vehicles, such as Twitter, to make definitive knowledge claims. Sismondo (2017), for example, contends that tweets from a Twitter account alone neither makes legitimate knowledge nor provides justifications for any existing knowledge claims. Accordingly, she asserts, content produced and distributed through various forms of social media meant to subvert current hegemonic knowledge structures will likely lead to authoritarianism rather than other forms of democratization, which aim to put the re-writing of the world back into the hands of a diverse group of people. In other words, the democratic aims of social media or the ways in which social media could emancipate and offer outlets for those unheard and unrepresented might turn in yet another way to control and colonialize.

Others take a less pessimistic tone. Horton (2017) claims that the “problem” of post-truth is not evidence, per se, but practices of power and dysfunctional democracy as exemplified in the previous argument about social media. In this instance, issues and agency for sociopolitical change remain constrained, despite enabling digital resources and expanding participations (Harsin, 2015). Thinking along the political sphere, Horton asserts that a post-truth world represents an intractable problem; one that reflects the unruly aspect of technology that challenges the limits of the pragmatic confines of a democratic society. For example, participatory digital cultures can at most take part in pseudopolitical discourse due to the practical limitations of their virtual confines (Harsin, 2015; Horton, 2017).

Moving beyond a discussion of sociopolitical consequence, Mair (2017), in turn, identified multiple main reasons and causes for today’s widespread post-truth phenomenon. Mair suggests (a) politicians’ dishonesty has changed from “covering up” to presenting “alternative facts,” (b) truth is no longer based on consensus and information users can no longer clearly separate trustworthy sources from other kind of sources, (c) individuals receive their information, knowledge, and truth from their inner circles and close friends (virtual and selective echo chambers), (d) audiences want to confirm information that they know already or find advantageous for them (confirmation bias), and (e) lack of critical thinking.

To offer some potential solutions to these “post-truth” problems, Butler-Adam (2017) emphasized the role of academia and universities in becoming more active in fighting post-truth and untrustworthy data. It could be productive to continuously deconstruct the nature of post-truth(s) or question post-truth assumptions, to arrive at alternative conclusions and productive possibilities of our post-truth era. For example, Nietzsche (1878/1984) has argued early on that “deviating natures” or a “partial weakening” was the precondition for evolutionary progress, not some uniform ideal (p. 107). Partial weakening of social media enables it to change, alter, and evolve. At the individual level, this might sometimes mean a moral “loss” (i.e., deviation from the norm) which ultimately yields surprisingly productive gains in unforeseen ways. In light of these potential gains, the authors of this article also suggest that qualitative inquiry may gain valuable insight when provoking deviating natures, as presented in post-truth.

Following many post-structural thinkers, we therefore seek to challenge the pessimistic views of the post-truth world mostly on prima facie grounds. We stand neither for nor against a post-truth world. We do not make the assumption that a crystal clear, stable truth-world preceded the post-truth era. Perhaps there was no pre post-truth moment to being with. To expose and then subvert our implicit assumptions and dominant ways of thinking about truth, un-truth, and post-truth also in the context of qualitative inquiry, we examine the “post-truth” world by first considering the broad conditions (e.g., ontologies, values, literacies/language) that shaped it and research practices guided by post-truth. In particular, we focus on social media as a means and an ends to our obsession over “truth.” In addition, to destabilize post-truth assumptions, we introduce mental comfort stories and critically question whether a pre-truth world ever existed. Next we discuss limitations of truth-regimes, academia, “truth” carnivals, and truth telling. Last, we then consider heterotopic spaces, such as social media, in leveraging onto-epistemological possibilities of our post-truth era.

Emergence of Post-Truth

It could be argued that in a liquid modernity (Bauman, 2000), circulating uncertainty and instability as the raw building blocks of knowledge and subjectivities, conditions became ripe for post-truth. When understanding current society as a liquid modernity, change is seen as the only constant element or factor. Moreover, this change is occurring at an increasingly rapid rate. As a result, social structures (e.g., family, neighborhoods, the economy, political institutions) change so fast that they can no longer be thought of as solid social frames of reference. Social life is then marked by a feeling of vulnerability, fragility, and uncertainty. Similarly, the constant state of flux deems the old structure “old-fashioned,” inflexible and the newest replacement as only temporary with a use-by expiration date. According to Bauman (2000), “[b]eing always, at any stage and at all times, ‘post-something’ is also an undetachable feature of modernity ” (p. 82).

Widespread instability, uncertainty, and fluidity renders many if not all socially embedded knowledge structures and their objective facts as in-flux “undecidables” (Derrida, 1981, p. 227). Post-truth emerges as the distancing and deferral of these pressing “undecidables,” as individuals and scholars seeks to grasp and hold onto a semblance of certainty and stability. Moreover, fashioning a durable (scholarly) identity in a liquid modernity is increasingly improbable; missing are the needed stable social structures (e.g., family, church, political institutions) around which stable identity coheres over time. Thus, individuals and scholars have shifted from a more orthodox time, where they identify as ultimately truth-seekers and “pilgrims” in search of deeper meaning, to one where they perform life as “tourists” in search of multiple but ephemeral social experiences (see Bauman, 2000).

In no other place is instability and post-truth more apparent, than within social media. Post-truth floods users of social media with ever more limitless opportunities for new conditions for complex human experiences and expression. As such, the very possibility of truth, truth telling, and authenticity comes under fire. Citizens and users of social media must constantly arm themselves against potential ontological inconsistency and epistemological falsehoods (e.g., fake websites, fake news, alternative truths, fabricated subjects). Post-truths expose the modernist notion of the subject and therein masquerade the subject as a fabricated one. No longer can citizens and participants in social media discourses view truth as a default, ultimate meaning and logic structure that they can blindly trust. Extra work and effort such as source referencing, cross-referencing with other sources, and logical deductions can help citizens and participants in social media to determine truth/falsehoods. Knowledge produced in today’s society and social media is frequently compared to automatized deception and assumed fabrication. “Objective” and/or contextual “facts” become increasingly less influential in shaping opinions, perspectives, and values communicated and shared in social media. Instead, for many social media users and scholars knowledge and ontologies are considered as porous and deceptive stimulating the creation of falsehoods (e.g., fake websites, alternative truths, untraceable fabricated subjects).

Post-truth in nation-state politics within globalized contexts becomes quite disorienting. Trump’s presidential election in the United States and the experiences of citizens in many other global contexts facilitate and sustain fertile sociopolitical conditions for the stabilization of post-truths. For example, Aaron Banks, the financial backer of the Brexit campaign, claimed “facts don’t work [. . .] You’ve got to connect with people emotionally. It’s the Trump success” (Deacon, 2016, para. 9).

Furthermore, various post-truth stabilization practices are enabled, supported, and maybe also further facilitated by different forms of neo-liberalisms. For instance, left behind by elitist neoliberal institutions are ideological legacies, which mask the grim reality (i.e., social immobility and gross inequity) of free market failure (Harvey, 2007). When hegemonic knowledge production becomes the hand-maiden in truth’s defense of itself, post-truth is the likely consequence. Once hegemonic knowledge structures dissipate and scatter, truth crumbles and becomes like sand on the beach (Foucault, 1994). Foucault’s historical claims about problematics of truth telling, the need for the multiple truths, and individuals/systems’ obsession with the truth have now come to the fore to radically reshape the lives and thoughts of many global citizens. In some ways, it is rather exciting to witness how today’s society and public opinions (so perfectly displayed through social media) have created an insurgent time for truth to question and multiply itself in continuously unexpected ways.

When driven by a combination of round-the-clock cycling of news, skewed news reporting, and the increasing ubiquity of social media (Alcorn, 2014), a post-truth state may be assumed to promote falsehood, fakeness, and unreliable knowledge production and also “fake science.” It is possible that all previous presented claims and assumptions are (alternatively) true, yet in this article, we approach post-truth state from a different angle. The emergence of post-truth as a phenomenon illustrates the over-determined nature of “objective” or absolute truth itself and reveals a world of complexity, where truth is derived of mixed-substances and sociopolitical multiplicities rather than a ordered, normalized chain of being and of rationality. In some ways, truth remains indefinitely reproduced and concealed as an absolute knowable entity.

For example, consider the litany of media misrepresentation, “rumor bombs,” hoaxes, fake news, plagiarisms, or the fabricated subjects living in the post-truth world (Harsin, 2015, p. 2). Multiple failed attempts by websites, such as emergent.info or snopes.com, to reestablish epistemological order by tagging breaking new stories—in real time—as either “false” “true,” or “unverified” (Harsin, 2015), turns truth telling into a losing game of tag. In sum, the post-truth phenomenon promotes a rather intricate perspectivism that rejects a certain calcified or a priori understandings of knowledge and subject production, which are often taken as a given from the comfort of our La-Z-Boy recliners and when one searches the truth about truth (see also Restall, 2009).

Fake News as Mental Comfort Stories at the Times of Post-Truth(s)

Fake news has been around for centuries. Oftentimes, people create fake news as a kind of religious folklore to insulate themselves from the unknown. Ontological distortions of life become quick-fixes that fashion mental comfort stories as a kind of self-medication for anxiety and uncertainty (Gee, 2013). Fabricating data or creating evidence (mostly finding causal patterns from correlation) allows for stories to have desirable content, such that seemingly random and irrational events are structured in a way that imposes control, order, and hope. And suddenly the world (previously so wide open, complex, and confusing) now appears safe and known—or at least more lucid. The “facts or truth” may be missing, but it’s hard to argue with a comfort that is so immediately empirical, tangible, and soothing. According to Gee (2013), the most common examples are religious mental comfort stories, which offer various spiritual truths to reason away suffering and death.

Because comfort stories function as one form of soothing self-deception or ontological anchor, they mainly work for those willing to live in the simplified bubble (Gee, 2013). All others who try and teach otherwise (i.e., truth is not singular certainty) will burst the bubble guiding these knowledges and discourses (Gee, 2017). It is possible that the less we know, the more comfort our comfort stories lend. To keep from drowning in the simultaneity of events, fluidity of (knowledge) exchanges, and conflicting voices, many citizens quickly tune in their signal and tune out all other indistinguishable frequencies in a whitewash of noise. All we hear is our collective super-sized self-talk: If McDonald’s can fashion a Big Mac in under 2 minutes, shouldn’t I be able to feast on a microwaveable onto-epistemological decidables in less time? My paper-thin wrapper has not the time to account for burdensome complexity or difference. So please flexibly automate yourself accordingly. Anything too stale to keep up with this mechanized reality show gets trashed. I expect machine-like consistency and quick, palatable results now. Don’t I deserve an immediately satisfying return-on-social-investment every time? Life in the fast lane couldn’t serve up a happier meal.

Never before have mental comfort stories reached such electronic fever pitch. The U.S. 2016 presidential election was an opportune time to deliberately publish post-truth propaganda via web traffic. And social media was a ripe platform, whereby one could take a mundane everyday mental comfort story and make it viral in a matter of minutes. We provide two examples: (a) “Tens of thousands of Fraudulent Clinton Ballots Found in an Ohio Warehouse,” and (b) “Megyn Kelly Fired From Fox News After Criticizing Trump.” Though both were fabricated, 6.1 million people read the first and over 724,000 saw the second (Shane, 2017). As we play with the social permutations that stand between us and a recognition of the reality around us, the consequences quickly become clear for individuals, society, and technology. In this instance, technology becomes more than just a tool, as our existence is lived out as a series of sociotechnical encounters (Latour, 1999). In the case of today’s social media post-truth era, as memes, videos, and other hypermedia texts co-evolve to co-produce other digital tools, technology acts a natural extension of thinking and the human being (Haraway, 1991).

Serving as a contestation between absence and presence of objectivity, truths operate in the ebb-and-flow spaces of conflicted “identities” and ever-evolving language tools. Furthermore, objectivity in these instances emerges as a diverse displacement between speech and writing (Derrida, 1981). In a post-truth world, mental comfort stories function as a diverse displacement of the self in a rather chaotic interplay of sign, signifiers, and signified. Knowledge production offers no remedies in the face of constant difference of/from differences. The privileging of speech over writing (or vice versa) emerges as a chimeric response to the thin distinction between myth and reality. Leveraging this thin line between myth and reality, mental comfort stories rely on the differences embedded in and endemic of language.

The comfort stories function then as a veiled remedy in the face of multiple truths and a semblance of objective reality. In Derrida’s terms, the comfort story operates as a pharmakon, or an “undecidable” vacillating between a poison and a cure, to foretell both perils and possibilities. Pharmakon is a kind of fabrication due to its construction of a truth based on artificial components and partial connections, which present themselves as remedies for a pathological condition. At best, comfort stories band-aid a rather large gaping wound, and at their worst, they can “. . . only displace or even aggregate the ill” (Derrida, 1981, p. 100). The problem, according to Derrida, is the elixir of the remedy is comprised with the very same ingredients of the disease. As Derrida (1981) explains, “. . . it is by nature absolutely heterogeneous and is constantly composing with the forces that tend to annihilate it” (p. 98). It is possible that the best “truth” serves as a proxy, virtuality, or an imaginary event or a fiction to comfort the subject. Subverting dominant ways of thinking about truth, post-truth, and un-truth, we therefore assert that the inevitability of an essentialized, calcified, easily legible, and easily operational “truth” may have been delusional and an element of “post-truth” itself.

Academia and “Truth” Carnivals

In On the genealogy of morals, Nietzsche (1887/1967) asserted that, even though science masquerades in opposition to religion, it merely replaces God with truth as an absolute and superior means of justifying existence. He warned, “The will to truth requires a critique . . . the value of truth must for once be experimentally called into question” (p. 153). Though scholars often denied it, Nietzsche was well aware that a “truth” as a part of “science carnival” will operate according to its own ways to potentially create another mental comfort story now in the context of academia and its scientific community. Narratives and discourses used in social media cut across very differently constructed and viewed platforms and spaces. As a result, the university, with its own haven of post-truth and its own social media representation, offers no exception to the creation of comfort stories. Often supported by today’s knowledge industry, academic comfort stories do their greatest work when rigorously crafting culturally acceptable stories and normative scholarly “selves” (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1972). Horkheimer and Adorno (1972) considered “culture industry” (p. 94) in terms of the mass (re)production of our cultural standards, whereby the industry of ideology (knowledge) is the strongest of all. Despite the notions of individuality and autonomous thought, a factory of standardized thinking and thought (i.e., absolute truth) is being (re)programmed into students through today’s digitally powered technocratic info society also permeating academia and virtual knowledge spaces. Learning and thinking take place inside of metric forums and external digitalized inputs and outputs evaluate students and teachers’ performance and knowledge structures.

Amid a global promise of higher education to privilege students’ uniqueness, cultivate individual leaders, and deliver local impact (citation), today’s entering freshman classes of 10,700 drown in the passivity of a factory production of a (knowledgeable and truthful) self (Keeler, 2013). In the midst of trying times and a grotesque knowledge industry, people including qualitative researchers are especially prone to invent their own morality, when they deem the rules unfair (Callahan, 2004). In addition, it could be possible that for students academic cheating is a pervasive and contested strategy of resistance in our knowledge culture (Högberg, 2011).

Recent cases show that online students can easily search the Internet and pay others to either write their papers for them or even take their entire web-based courses for them (Wolverton, 2016). Given the demand is so high, independent and profitable cheating companies are established to meet these requests by supplying a cornucopia of resources and supportive services. For example, a plethora of websites, such as TakeYourClass.com, NoNeedtoStudy.com, OnlineClassHelp.com, and BoostMyGrade.com, abound which center on accepting money in exchange for completing online students’ entire course load (Wolverton, 2016). And the websites are not discrete, as one company broadcasts that it has completed online classes for over 11,000 students from top colleges, such as Harvard and Duke (NoNeedtoStudy.com). Perhaps there is no opposition to this trend, as morality often binds and blinds. “As cheating companies expand their reach, colleges have little incentive to slow their growth. There’s no money in catching the cheaters. But there’s a lot of money in upping enrollment” (Wolverton, 2016, para. 10). In other words, while the academy continues to purport standards of student excellence and success, some question how little effort is actually spent evaluating the “realness” of the ivory holding up its towers.

Crowded within lecture halls often taught by machine (e.g., computer, radio, TV, video), little room is left for individuality within a mass culture of insatiable uniformity and efficiency. Efforts to extinguish individuality can lead to dangerous consequences such as groupthink, where the collective desire for conformity overrides the critical evaluation of alternative viewpoints. This groupthink knowledge production is de-politicized into a “right” and “wrong.” Furthermore, this white-washed narrative is delivered as a quick and codified product, marketed to prospective students by a financial return-on-investment. In the compulsory drive to produce, learn, and achieve expertise, there is no time for the critical self-reflection valued as a central method for deeper learning and discovery (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999). These truth strategies and this view of truth not only alienates one from the self but also compels one to ignore evidence that may contradict long-held beliefs (Gee, 2013). In the face of the knowledge industry permeating our universities, many scholars and students are oppressed by their own ideals (e.g., perfection, absolute truth) and therein left to drown in their own mass deception. The desirable end comes in trying to find ways to survive from one’s own mass deception and put post-truths to work in productive ways.

But what happens to parrhesia, or courageous truth telling, in a post-truth world? Those who practice parrhesia as a care of the self, do so within their own contexts given the regimes of truth within them. According to Foucault (2001), parrhesiastic practices involve speaking truth to an authority who has influence over him or her and, in so doing, risking something of great personal importance. Courage is a vital aspect of the parrhesiastic moment. Thus, the notion of risk takes on a rather significant role in the parrhesiastic moment in the post-truth era. Under neo-liberalism, where dwindling social-safety nets and greater responsibility to take care of oneself characterize the situation for many people, the courage to speak out proves to be rather perilous especially in the contexts of tenure, promoting, and publishing. In our post-truth era, truth no longer has credibility and despite the astute accuracy of its prophecy, no one listens to it. Truth is old, outdated, battered by lies with no eyes to see, suffering the tragedy of never being heard. Given this, can parrhesia exist without a general understanding of/faith in truth? Despite a persuasive rhetoric, when knowledge itself can be debatable/unreliable, is speaking out against authorities still perilous? The subjects living in the post-truth world no longer bare risks associated with their actions and have no need for fearless speech or desire to shift the public discourses through their own life experiences.

The Heterotopic Spaces for Multiple Truths

Heterotopia in academia and “truth” carnivals of public and private spheres shape not only the scholarly practices but also the lives of individuals in today’s societies. For Foucault (1986), offering alternative spaces for truth telling are sites that have curious properties, sites that connect with other sites while suspecting, neutralizing, or inventing relations they mirror or reflect. This and the recent news media breakdown may be indicative of current global and virtual heterotopia (Foucault, 1986). Following Foucault, heterotopia differentiates itself from both the utopia (i.e., place of idealism) and dystopia (i.e., place of unimaginable evil) to comprise in-between spaces of possibility, contradiction, and collision. Juxtaposed within a single real space are several spaces that are incompatible, isolated yet permeable (Foucault, 1986). Furthermore, heterotopias link to slices of time when traditional time is being broken or time accumulates differently, as in festival time. A floating piece of “truth” space and a truth space without a truth exemplifies for Foucault heterotopia, par excellence. This space/time collision functions against all hegemony to provide the underlying connectivity through which multiple spaces including social media spaces interact, inter-operate, and overlap. In this way, it can proliferate not one single truth, but a multiplicity of truths in new and unforeseen ways and speeds.

Our social media heterotopia is messy and ill-constituted, yet its intersecting relations of knowledge, power, and subjectivity often yield unforeseen capacity for transformation. In other words, this heterotopic platform has the capacity to become the lived nexus of struggle and contention, wherein ideas, beliefs, principles, and materialities can be socially shaped and reshaped. Given the possibilities that could erupt from living out their contradictions and power/knowledge collisions, Foucault (1984) fractured ways of understanding the consequential effects of heterotopic space as both oppressive and potentially empowering. Seen this way, social media heterotopias, differ from academic “truth” carnivals, in that they are spaces radically open to change offering unforeseen potential for resistance and empowerment whereas academia is much slower, potentially ineffective and less transformative due to its hierarchical structures.

From a Foucauldian perspective, no essential, transcendental, naturalized, or normal form of truth exists; truth persists in heterotopic spaces. Herein, truth shakes and is shaken by practices and discourses within a given space. Hence, truth(s) emerges through an amalgamation of various historical practices and discourse, and it is propped up by various forms of power/knowledge. Knowledge informs and is informed by regimes of truth. According to Foucault (1980), the heterotopic nature of truth-regimes involves not so much the ideological content of truth nor the theories that undergird such ideologies, but what dictates, demarcates, and governs the practices and rationalities that demarcate the sayable, knowable, doable, desirable of various truth-regimes and social media forums. Truth is built through and by various architectures of constraints. Thus, the post-truth moment represents the end of an omnipotent nature of truth. From Foucault’s (1980) perspective (and ours), good riddance to Truth! Simultaneously, the dissipation of truth still permits it to assemble whether sporadically, spontaneously, or deliberately based on what governs the sayable and doable social media spaces.

So, What Are We Saying?

One potential response to the post-truth realism could be denial or rejection by academics and qualitative researchers who refuse a liquid modernity and its attempts to engage with the audience and discourses created and influenced by post-truth phenomenon. Another potential response is that the productive forces of post-truth could be utilized and even celebrated more. In some ways different societal discourses, social media, and opinions of the public have finally caught up with postmodernisms and other posts including post-qualitative inquiries. Similarly, liquid modernity has emerged and begun to manufacture highly unstable (i.e., liquid) knowledges already produced for decades if not centuries in philosophy, scholarly discourses, and publications. In today’s society, social media and the public is confronted with a need to learn to live with uncertainty of knowledge, situated truths, partial connections, and fragmentation of information.

Truth, news, valuable knowledge(s) cannot be traced back to signifier signified linkages or their origins, as knowledge and language productively fail. News similar to qualitative research and knowledge can be both accurate and inaccurate, narratives sincere and falsified. Truth can no longer hide behind well-written prose or rely on sophisticated words. Truth is no longer necessarily or assumed to be associated with science either. In some ways, Derrida’s prayers have been answered. Immanent and endless aporia characterizes this new state of knowledge, truths, news, and information. As a result, readers, listeners, and users of social media no longer know how to approach language and what to do with the texts (e.g., media, news, utterances) they encounter, given these texts no longer function in expected ways. Language, truth, and stories reinvent themselves immanently and continuously and citizens need to hear and listen, without being able to evaluate the truth-value these stories offer. Information, evidence, description, and stories—forms of expression that belie representation—prove to be quite useless in the perils and possibilities of the post-truth. What’s left is the ways in which the governing rules of those forms of expression get processed and translated. Rather than focusing on generating “facts” and “objective” knowledge, scholars could invent various approaches that help individuals to process diverse modes of expression and translation. Maybe more time and effort could be directed to diverse and layered interpretation practices and alternative forms of communication and thought that are likely to revise post-truth knowledge regimes. In brief, scholars can continue to continually refashion the rules of the truth game (see Foucault, 1980).

In addition to rawness, unfinished-ness, and uncertainty, comes hope, anticipation, becoming, surprise, and relationality to possibly aide in keeping (non)methodologies, theories, subjects and objects in parallel flux with the complex, unpredictable, and increasingly dense post-truth world we live in. Following Odlyzko (2017), post-truth is a rather desirable evolutionary stage for human societies—especially as a post-truth world could enable individuals to resist inflexible realities. Odlyzko advocates for development of methods to advance illusionary worlds and alternative realities because human life might depend on fooling others and oneself. “Fooling” oneself and others, different forms of aporia and surprise could assist individuals living and working in the post-truth society to generate difference and change that matters. According to Nancy (2000), surprise does not belong to the order of presentation. Rather it is the leap, or “it” which occurs during the leap. Leap surprising itself. “The leap coincides with the surprise; it is nothing but this surprise, which still does not even ‘belong’ to it” (Nancy, 2000, p. 173).

It is no news that many thinkers view knowledges as partial, uncertain, and overproduced. Scholars from Nietzsche, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, to Deleuze and others have lived through, argued for, and practiced post-truth in its various forms for a long time. Fabricated subjects, nonsubjects, virtual, becoming, relational, material, and discursive subjects (both human and nonhuman) have generated nonstories, counter narratives, hyperreal theories, overly reproduced relations, knowledges, and information linkages which cannot be traced back to their origins or to a particular subject formation. What follows is that inquirers are in many ways liberated and these un-knowing subjects are forced to participate in and live through ongoing transformation. Un-knowing subjects need to make decisions in the face of aporia and the “undecidables” (see Derrida, 1993). Also, at the time of post-truth, scholars and public can finally practice and celebrate knowledges that question themselves.

For the field of qualitative inquiry to keep pace, we must usher in a new space for (non)methodologies, theories, subjects, and objects in parallel flux with the complex, unpredictable, and increasingly dense post-truth world we live in. Deconstruction has much to offer for this kind of qualitative inquiry. For instance, deconstruction—along with problematized identity politics, linguistic, and ontological turns, as well as ontologies of difference—has enabled individuals to identify and work through inconsistencies in language, concepts, and practices. The state of paradox and inconsistencies offer different tools to conceptualize and carry out inquiry. No longer simply assumed, value of inquiry and reliability of knowledge, researcher approaches, and representation must be continuously reevaluated and contested in every new situation (Derrida, 1981; Foucault, 1980, 2001; Nietzsche, 1887/1967). Ontological and epistemological doubt (carried on the back of post-truths) could function as a productive force which enables situational and situated knowledges to operate without getting caught in their own shadows and inconsistencies. Doubt might function as today’s wonder or historical reason producing us, them, and also the unexpected and surprising.

Moreover, in today’s society and media culture, we have prepared ourselves fertile grounds for skepticism and speculative knowledge politics. Intellectualism and academia as we have come to know them are under various attacks. Maybe knowledge institutions relying on scientific or other forms of normative and unmediated absolute truths are overly old-fashioned and outlived. Maybe it is time for skepticism and speculative knowledge politics to produce or facilitate new, newly renewed, and productive shared and collective spaces for public science and scholarship which continuously contests its own “truths” and assumptions. Instead of truth, we might be happy with postulations and endless lineage of perspectives and viewpoints.

Clinging too tightly to an absolute or singular truth may have consequences that can be destructive in various ways. Post-truths are here to stay and one might say they are also finally here. Without a radically open heterotopic space that calls for tension and struggle, knowledges may have increasingly limited space to create change, emancipate, and address differences. They muddle the rather thin distinctions among concepts such as fact, objectivity, subjectivity, truth, empiricism, and materialism. It is within the opacity of the multiplicities of truths that the plurality of objectivity and facts merge with subjectivity, empiricisms, and materialisms to create an ethics of responsibility (see Butler, 2005). For it is within the opacity that we now have a responsibility to be compassionate with one another as borders crumble and the over-determined deferral of language games reign supreme. And all the while, rhizomatic contestations of subject positions float and scatter in poly-hedronic, cacophonic, and disjointed speeds. How to reconceptualize ethical scholarship and responsible inquiry practices under these fluid and indefinitely diversifying conditions? At the times of fluid modernity and messy intersecting relations of knowledge, power, and subjectivity, social media offer interesting possibilities to transform knowledge and think about qualitative inquiry and its assumptions differently. In the context of continuously changing knowledge conditions and inquiry that re-invents itself post-truth(s) must also keep up maybe by leaping and surprising themselves and others to better survive in the world they have created.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biographies

Mirka Koro-Ljungberg, PhD (University of Helsinki), is a Professor of qualitative research at the Arizona State University. Her scholarship operates in the intersection of methodology, philosophy, and socio-cultural critique and her work aims to contribute to methodological knowledge, experimentation, and theoretical development across various traditions associated with qualitative research. She has published in various qualitative and educational journals and she is the author of Reconceptualizing qualitative research: Methodologies without methodology (2016) published by SAGE and co-editor of Disrupting data in qualitative inquiry: Entanglements with the Post-Critical and Post-Anthropocentric (2017) by Peter Lang.

David Lee Carlson is an associate professor in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. He researches and writes in the areas of qualitative inquiry, queer studies in education, and secondary English education.

Anna Montana is a postdoctoral scholar within Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University. Her research is broadly informed by a transdisciplinary diffusion of theoretical frameworks (e.g., posthumanism, critical theory, spatiality) and methodologies (e.g., narrative inquiry, geo-ethnographies, spatial analysis, actor-network theory, Foucauldian genealogy, post-qualitative assemblages) to innovate at the edge of qualitative research.

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