C’est quoi post-truth,new era or time-immemorial? Conceptual reflections for democracy,power and free speech

Affective politics

In line with this narrative on post-truth, rationality, truth and reason have been replaced with falsehoods and emotions (D’Ancona, 2017). In this epistemological context, what is prominent is not only the disregard for ascertaining truth but also the increasing role of affect (Dahlgren, 2018: 2065). As rational argument is rendered non-measurable as a mode of discourse, truth, aligned with feelings is said to be reformulated as “inner subjective reality with affective leap”. This, then grants itself to be the foundation for validity claims about reality (Dahlgren, 2018: 2065). Therefore, more than critical reasoning, affect performs a substantial role in helping people to navigate the massive infoglut that challenges them at rising intensity (ibid.; Andrejevic, 2013). As rational politics and communication is said to pave the way towards affective politics and communications, this situation is claimed to be closely complemented with the erosion of accountability and the dismissal of expertise which stand to be an important bearer of rationality (Enfield, 2017). Under these conditions, a close affiliation is diagnosed between the post-truth condition and populism as well.

Populism as handmaiden of post-truth

The upsurge of populist politics is understood to be symptomatic of the consolidation of post-truth communication as a distinctive feature of contemporary political ecosystem (Waisbord, 2018). Populism’s Manichean politics of polarization, grants itself in opposition to the possibility of truth-telling as a collective effort for the establishment of agreed-upon facts and reach consensus. Populism’s harsh critique of democracy pinpoints towards an outright opposition to cornerstone principles of democracy, including respect for minority opinion, the demand for transparency and accountability and the search for consensus (ibid.). The campaigns during the Brexit referendum and US presidential elections were likened to “limited, unimaginative and uninspiring moral worlds” marked by falsehoods. Polarization is said to be emerged between one kind of moral decline, the passive acceptance of extreme wealth inequality, and of the socially backward aspects of globalization and another, xenophobic sentiment fed with an agenda of nationalist aggression (Forstenzer, 2018: 6).

Moreover, the condition of “false balance in news reporting” where journalists simply allow both sides to argue without portraying the facts means truth becomes a matter of opinion or assertion which was claimed to be clearly apparent in BBC’s coverage of Brexit (Suiter, 2016: 26). Post-truth rhetoric accordingly, is marked as moral mediocrity. This is said to function as discursive mobilization of ideas relating to the “absence of epistemic norms or direct rejection of the epistemic authority of technical experts, academics, and reliable media outlets” (ibid: 7). As populism opposes the principal qualities of democratic communication, especially the need for fact-based, reasoned debate, tolerance and solidarity, it also deters key qualities of public communication such as the role of watchdog journalism, unfettered speech, state protection of speech rights and the centrality of deliberation across difference (Waisbord, 2014). The eminence of emotion, affect, sentiment and populism’s connection with post-truth communication (added emphasis) is also foregrounded by what is termed “the demise of symbolic efficiency”. This happens so far as affective communication and populism are associated with the cognitive shortcuts through the deadlock of representation (the reflexive recognition that all representations are partial, and that the goal of being fully informed is an impossible/infinite one) (Andrejevic, 2013). By being affiliated with the demise of symbolic efficiency, post-truth as a concept also gets affiliated with a loss of trust in experts and institutional authority.

The demise of symbolic efficiency and loss of trust in expertise

The demise of symbolic efficiency points towards a crisis in institutional authority and a decrease in the ability of authorities to interrupt the endless stream of reflexive questioning and win recognition for institutional truth claims (Gibson, 2018: 3171). This, according to Zizek (1999), has many reasons, including especially the post-Enlightenment realization that human life is completely in human hands with the lack of Nature or Tradition providing a firm foundation on which one can rely (Myers, 2003: 49). Therefore, we are said to move beyond an era when a consensus about the content of truth was possible (Harsin, 2017: 515; Döveling et al. 2018). Charting over time the reasons why the trust in the technocratic state began declining, a critical reference is made to the selective reach of the Enlightenment ideals of scientific progress, the ideal of Western modernity which transformed into a means of colonial depredation and the current economic deprivation of the large sections of the population (Davies, 2018). In an environment where no institution (or class of institutions has a monopoly over news anymore, any account of event, a trend or a perspective will have their counter-account, “underlining how social reality is represented as a continually evolving assemblage of mixing diverse accounts” (Döveling et al. 2018:3). This loss of solid basis, therefore, is said to be the breeding ground for the discursive conditions undermining not only the legitimacy of any single claim, “but the possibility of knowledge and credibility as such through the generation of popular mistrust (Dean, 2010: 103). A great deal of irony is said to be created where all forms of expertise are open to be easily politicized (Gibson, 2018: 3177).

Moreover, to focus on more recent corruption of facts is in Davies’s opinion, neglecting the ways in which the authority of facts has been in decline for a long time (Davies, 2016). While the tendency to represent society in terms of facts first emerged in the medieval times with the birth of accounting which generated a kind of truth with no need of interpretation or faith on the part of the person reading it, accounting was later joined by statistics, economics, surveys and a range of other numerical methods. Although these methods were initially the preserve of small, tight-knit institutions and academic societies, in the 20th century, an apparent industry for facts emerged (ibid.). The problem according to Davies (2018), comes through the oversupply of facts in the 21st century with the multiplication of experts and agencies involved in producing facts with varying degrees of credibility, most of the time in exchange for financial gain. The proliferation of facts and fact-producers gave birth to trivialisation as a natural consequence. Experts themselves are not impeccable in the sense that they are being proven wrong many times as well as they are open to change with new evidence becoming available (Baggini, 2017: 38–39, 77–80).

A reference is made to the British –Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, who believed that nobody should have a monopoly on truth where the facts should compete in a marketplace of ideas. Nevertheless, while prices have kept shifting, versed at nudging real life human desires than giving us a complete picture of reality, Davies (2018) argues, it is viable to consider the market as a post-truth institution that deters us from knowing the reality. Accordingly, in the so-called post-ideological age (Davies, 2016), the phenomenon of evidence based policy, popular among liberal politicians in the late 1990s and early 2000s, witnessed economics being inclined towards justifying government programs where the institutions that claim to stand for reasoned consensus, have failed to incorporate human emotions. The historical references regarding the loss of trust in expertise and institutional authority are also strongly affiliated with the rise of postmodern philosophy which is claimed to be currently adopted by the right-wing movement, which in turn is assumed to create the contemporary post-truth condition.

Postmodern philosophy hijacked

While during the high period of postmodern philosophy (Lyotard, 1984), the main challenge to the notions of objectivity and neutrality in science arose from a left-leaning criticism of corporate and state power, postmodern deconstruction is now claimed to have been hijacked by the right-wing movement (Gibson, 2018: 3177). The principal characteristic of this appropriation is said to be the rendering of all evidence-based claims to a matter of politics and the ousting of capital-S Science as merely one mode of discourse among many (Andrejevic, 2013: 9) In this way, “the infectious spread of pernicious relativism” gets disguised as legitimate scepticism (D’Ancona, 2017). Accordingly, the changing information landscape is said to have important consequences for questions of power and politics (Andrejevic, 2013:18). From this angle, although in an era of relative media and data scarcity, the political control of information was based on an endeavour to impose dominant narratives aligned with the interests of those in power, in an era of information glut, new strategies of control emerge alongside these. For instance, control over information no longer necessarily depends upon sustaining a dominant narrative but the multiplication of contradictory explanations and narratives. Hence, historically, as the technologies rendered the information more readily available, a potential challenge to dominant forms of power had become available (Andrejevic, 2013: 29). As the interactivity of the internet became political, it altered the control to the receivers of messages and rendered all representations of reality vulnerable to public challenge and disbelief (Coleman, 2003: 19). Here, the hermeneutics of suspicion performs as a tool of empowerment when strategies of control perform in the register of truth (Andrejevic, 2013: 29–30). However, when the modality of control is mobilized so that the tools formerly associated with challenging, suspecting, and deconstructing dominant narratives come to align themselves with strategies of control for regressive ends, this, for Andrejevic, becomes problematic (Andrejevic, 2013: 30; Latour, 2004: 3).

Such form of narrative multiplication is said to have become the epicentre of the media strategy of the so-called “postmodern right” for handling political debates such as climate change (Andrejevic, 2013: 21). Theological accounts are said to be embraced as a counterpoint to empirical evidence where the attack comes especially on science, on universities, on expert opinion, and on the courts (Dahlgren, 2018: 2065). What the postmodern right obtained from the postmodern turn, is both an obsession with the power of the image and the comprehension that all truths are constructed. This comes as a useful strategy both for debunking dominant narratives, and for undermining critique. As this is characterized as the emergence of post-truth politics, post-truth-ness becomes a small-c conservative strategy as it tends to work in the interest of existing power relations without progressive ends: there is not much point in neutralizing critique if the existing power relations are in fact desired to be challenged and transformed (Andrejevic, 2013: 26–27). Correspondingly, the progressive dimensions of Foucauldian power-knowledge-truth nexus is said to have been deconstructed and reformulated for regressive ends. The postmodern right perceives science for example, through a smart reformulation of Foucauldian thought, as a form of “power-knowledge” without a privileged claim to truth (Gibson, 2018: 3177). Multiplication of narratives in this way is also closely associated with the rise of new technologies.

New media and technologies as the catalyst

New media and technologies are also perceived to be the driving catalyst for the culmination of the post-truth condition. Mediatization is used as a meta-concept to elaborate on the post-truth condition in this sense where various societal domains, organizations and institutions are increasingly coming under the influence of media logics where media, through leaving affective imprints on ourselves and others, are perceived to be the primary tools for social interaction and construction of shared life-worlds. They are key to establishing our perceptions of ourselves, of others and of various social and political realms in general (Kalpokas, 2019). Mediatization in fact came in waves- mechanization, electrification, digitalization (our current stage) where each of them changed the media environment fundamentally (Couldry and Hepp, 2017: 144). Hence, mediatization should be comprehended as a process of the increasing deepening of technology-based interdependence. This deepening has two senses- firstly that over the past 600 years, an acceleration of technological innovations in media has taken place, and secondly that over the same period, media have become increasingly relevant to articulating the kind of cultures and societies we live in, due to media’s changing role in the conditions of human interdependence (ibid.). Simultaneous to deep mediatization through digitalization, the trust in the older institutions in both politics and media are said to be declining. The situation gets complemented therefore, with a transition from an older logic of media where politicians and journalists were co-dependent for coverage and for content, with journalists performing a gatekeeping role, to the new hybrid media ecosystem of social media, blogs, reality TV, which is said to contradict this with politicians being able to communicate with the electorate directly, creating a reverse gatekeeping effect (Chadwick, 2017). Not to forget the algorithms driving citizens into “echo-chambers” and “filter bubbles” (D’Ancona, 2017).

In an environment where there is a transition from an “Information to an Experience Age” (Kalpokas, 2019), attracting audience attention becomes paramount where the statements become true if audiences desire them to be as such which then paves the way to the establishment of affiliative truths capable of mobilising audiences. Nevertheless, in this “truth market”, propositions are not randomly offered but carefully crafted through the analysis of the target audience with the use of new technologies, determining beforehand, their feelings, tastes, preconceptions and stereotypes where the task of communicators/marketers is rendered easier by big data analysis that provides both the relevant characteristics of the target audience and a real-time insight into the performance of truth-claims (ibid.). Data can be a radical contributor to our post-truth condition -as transformative of our society as accounting proved to be 500 years ago- as we are said to be in the middle of a transition from a society of facts to a society of data (Davies, 2016). Connected with the discussion on media and the new technologies, there is also a recurring comprehension on the connection between the citizens and the post-truth condition.

The beguiled and the post-truth

The post-truth phenomenon is also extensively associated with the perception, attitude and behaviour of citizens in the face of contemporary political ecosystem and circulating political information and communication. The main novelty of this “post-truth era” for d’Ancona comes not with the dishonesty of politicians but rather the public’s response to it, replacing outrage with indifference and, in some cases complicity, collusion and collaboration of citizens (d’Ancona, 2017: 26). Post-truth becomes unavoidable because people are psychologically attracted to those groups that they feel they belong, and are convinced by politicians and ideas that already fit their current worldview, social norms, values and group identities (Ball, 2017: 192). The people get accused due to their psychological tendencies to be biased to phenomena that flow smoothly with their preconceived worldview and to abide by sentiment rather than fact (Davis, 2017). Aligned with Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s work, when people get confronted with a truth which contradicts a bias they hold, they as species are said to get rid of the “truth” (Suiter, 2016: 27). Despite having more nuanced arguments at times, broadly, the emerging discussions regarding the “post-truth condition as a new era” follow certain re-occurring patterns. Nevertheless, in the next sections, the assumed novelty of this current trajectory called post-truth by certain analysts and commentators will be provided with critical scrutiny.

Post-truth as time-immemorial: The truths of lion and fox

Steve Fuller argues that the post-truth concept has always been always with us in both politics and science in much deeper and fundamental ways (Fuller, 2018:1) where Oxford Dictionary definition of the term is a post-truth definition of “post-truth” which refers to how those dominant in the relevant knowledge-power game want their opponents to be perceived. For him, informing all is Plato’s view of the world, which Niccolò Machiavelli democratized in the Renaissance and it was updated for contemporary world by Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923). For Pareto, what passes for social order, is the result of the interplay of two sorts of elites, which he called, following Machiavelli, “lions” (i.e: contemporary elite experts or liberal politicians) and “foxes” (i.e: right-wing politicians) where both parties can be regarded as post-truth merchants (ibid: 2). The lions regard the status quo’s comprehension of the past as a reliable basis for moving into the future, whereas the foxes regard the status quo as involving a corrupt understanding of the past that prevents movement into a better future. History therefore, involves the repetition of the circulation of these two temporal orientations.

The Oxford Dictionary definition of post-truth, therefore alludes to the lion’s truth, which tries to establish a moral and epistemic distance from the sorts of truth the fox may be producing. Therefore, the fox, but not the lion is portrayed as distorting the facts (by enhancing the counter-factual imagination) and appealing to emotion (Fuller, 2018: 2). To that end, the anxiety expressed by especially liberal mainstream scholars and analysts regarding an alarming deterioration of facts and truth in Western democratic societies and a call for a “pro-truth society” by re-positioning facts at the centre of political decision making, for example, resonates with a similar understanding of a leonine attitude to politics. If we make a journey back to the history of philosophy and reach Plato and Sophists, we can observe a resonant comprehension on how the condition of multiplication of narratives and creating the necessary skills and conditions for the multiplication of narratives was regarded as a sin, how social order was conventionally maintained and how democracies were perceived to decline.

Post-truth as time-immemorial: The footprints of ancient philosophy

Comprehending Plato and Sophists’ diversion in their understanding of the conditions that make truth possible, requires looking at how they differ in their grasp of the specifics of politics- Sophists, as a game of chance, and Plato as a game of skill where the sophistically trained client uses skill in order to maximize chance occurrences, while Plato’s philosopher king uses the same skills to reduce or counteract the workings of chance (Fuller, 2018: 31). Accordingly, performing arts, can be regarded as natural tools of the post-truth world where the Platonic enterprise for example, would consider the playwrights and actors as total political threats due to their capacity to blur the audience’s sense of the difference between the actual and the possible (ibid: 32). Also, Socrates, for example, dismisses the art of writing in Phaedrus as writing would pave the space for free expression and rising levels of literacy, which would then make the governing task for any aspiring philosopher-king much more difficult (ibid: 31).

In histories of theology and philosophy, Plato’s Janus-faced position is “the double truth doctrine” (Melzer, 2014: chapter 2) where Plato not only rejects the existence of truth, but also claims personal allegiance to it, which endorses the epistemic superiority of the belief system of the elites over the masses, that in turn, is thought to pave the way for more effective governance (Fuller, 2018: 32). These ideas are also directly connected with the concept of mimesis, understood in Ancient Greece as mimicry, representation or imitation (Clay, 2000: 18; Gebauer & Wulf, 1995), referring to what people do, not what things are, a relationship between an action (i.e a process) and its model (Bakker, 1999: 16), it was Plato who first adopted it as a theoretical term in the three but interconnected means. These were; dramatic impersonation, learning through imitation of behaviour, and finally, both the total act of poetic representation and the audience’s emotional identification with the performance (Haskins, 2000: 8–9, Bakker, 1999: 17). However, for Plato, mimesis was something that had to be rejected due to its “inadequacy and incompleteness with respect to the subject matter and its corrupting effect on the listener” (Haskins, 2000: 9). Regarding the notion of inadequacy, the bottom line of the argument is that, mimesis for Plato, relates not with the thing in itself but with representation and appearance only (Plato, Republic XIII: 598b). The most important point here is the imitational character and the triple remove of mimesis from reality: “According to Plato, mimetic representation is merely an imperfect imitation of an artefact, which in itself is the reflection of the ultimate idea of the thing” (Republic, XIII: 597b–598b; Gebauer & Wulf, 1995:38–37; Kalpokas, 2016: 127).

Therefore, due to their performance and articulation of “alternative worlds” on stage, what playwrights threaten to reveal and what Plato would rather keep secret- is the “repression of the imagination that is imperative for the regime of the lawgiver to correlate to the people’s sense of a natural order” (Fuller, 2018) which is, in fact the result of a resolution of opposing forces in a power struggle (ibid:33). This can be tied up with Platonically inspired Machiavelli’s key question on how to defend democracy or a republic which is connected with his thought on why democracies decline where two big problems, partisanship (a society with divergent viewpoints, polarized opinions) and excess of inequality (any sense of a shared commitment to common values and institutions becomes destroyed), prevail (Benner, 2017). In addition to Fuller’s historical-philosophical reflections that bring a critique to the novelty of the post-truth phenomenon, the concept of post-truth is also being comprehended as a result of communicative capitalism and corrupt democracy, rather than being an instant, novel phenomenon.

Post-truth as immemorial: Communicative capitalism

The primary concern according to this perspective is that we have been living with “fake democracy” for a long time and not that we are suddenly surrounded by what is described as “fake news” (Freedman & Fenton, 2018: 3). Correspondingly, although media was formerly imbued with responsibilities for being an independent watchdog, monitor of unchecked power, tribune of the people, a defender of minorities, a fourth estate and public sphere with the free exchange of information and ideas as central foundation of democratic societies (ibid: 1), an opposite direction is said to take hold. While the media started pampering the interests of the powerful by devouring the vulnerable, its noble crusade for “truth” and “justice” have been replaced by phantasmagoria of gossip and spectacle with a commitment to the notion of the consumer. In this way, by adopting the mantras of the free market and class rule, media no longer exists as an outlier making sure the free expression, political participation and democratic renewal (ibid.). The result is an increasing loss of authority and legitimacy in the sense that the media was distrusted in 82 percent of the 28 countries being surveyed (ibid.). This situation, rather than being novel and unique, is part of a wider narrative about the degeneration of the liberal centre and its failure to distinguish itself from the market forces that evacuated, commodified and trivialized those spaces with which democracy has been traditionally associated (ibid.).

Growing lack of civic participation and confidence in political processes and established systems of governance in Western democracies can also be reasoned with the unresponsiveness and the indifference of the system and the political class towards the demands of citizens (Dahlgren, 2018: 2064; Freedman & Fenton, 2018: 3). Media is said to play an enormous role in this by favouring the upward transfer and concentration of property and wealth (Freedman & Fenton, 2018: 4) while failing in utilizing their symbolic power to offer alternative visions and truly representative narratives. Therefore, convergent shifts in cultural production, journalism, political communication, marketing and data mining have all paved the way to the emergence of a mediated regime facilitated by deregulated, commodified, affective and even faster forms of what Jodi Dean (2005) calls “communicative capitalism” which has been unfolding for the last 40 years. This prepared the way for what is termed as “post-truth” politics based on over-abundance of facts and an under-provision of meaningful analysis (Freedman & Fenton, 2018: 6). In the next section, we will continue with critical reflections.

Nuance on post-truth: New era or time-immemorial?

From the media perspective, some scholars, journalists and commentators in the West argue in an emergency mode as we observed in the first section that we have entered into a new era called “post-truth” where there is an alarming deterioration of truth or facts in Western liberal democracies, coupled with the erosion of trust, accountability and the dismissal of scientific expertise which pose a challenge to democracy itself (Enfield, 2017). According to this alarming diagnosis which has become widespread especially after the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump, affect and populism pervade all areas of politics and political communication where the citizens are easily convinced by their psychological tendencies and preconceptions. Taking into account Vilfredo Pareto’s comprehension on lions and foxes and how the conventional social order is maintained as well as the original Platonic system of law and order with the unresolved conflict between appearance and reality can be eerily resonant with the perceived novelty and the felt anxiety about our contemporary conjecture, named the post-truth condition by certain scholars and analysts who believe that the political system especially in the West is instantly changing/has changed from a rational to an emotional system, leaving the truth and facts behind with a multiplication of narratives to which the audiences are easily complying to (Fuller, 2018).

Therefore, the way the term- post-truth- has been used especially from the Western liberal bourgeoise perspective on the one hand can be comprehended to refer to the more recent version of the -in fact- recrudescing (at different points in history with different faces) crisis of the legitimacy of democracy (which has many intertwined reasons) that can be observed to make itself felt by many, especially after the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump. Machiavelli, many years ago, already reflected on the reasons why the democracies decline- partisanship (a society with divergent viewpoints, polarized opinions), and excess of inequality (where any sense of a shared commitment to common values and institutions becomes destroyed) (Benner, 2017) prevail. Although this may have the tendency to give a hint of “the crisis mode” of democracies and post-truth as time-immemorial, its direct projection to our current condition is short-sighted. Despite having the tendency in explaining the anxiety felt by the Western bourgeoise intelligentsia regarding the current dislocation as well as pointing out that propaganda and narrative multiplication is an age-old phenomenon, Machiavelli, Vilfredo Pareto and hence Steve Fuller provide a rather top-down Western gaze towards the crisis of democracy and hence how the conventional social order should be maintained. This does not offer a path both for going beyond the actual status quo, but also for comprehending the new characteristics of the recent dislocation, due to its acknowledgement of the current moment just as a cursory repetition of a very Western history.

Hence, if we look at the decline of trust in expertise, the technocratic state, and the notion of facts, as aforementioned, the demise of symbolic efficiency is a concept that directs towards the crisis of institutional authority and a decline in the ability of authorities to interrupt the endless spate of reflexive questioning and win acknowledgment for institutional truth-claims (Gibson, 2018: 3171). The reasons for this include especially, the post-Enlightenment realization that human life is completely in human hands with the lack of Nature or Tradition providing a firm foundation on which one can rely (Myers, 2003: 49). Similarly, the reasons why the trust in the technocratic state began declining over time include the selective reach of the Enlightenment ideals of scientific progress, the ideal of Western modernity which transformed into a means of colonial depredation and the current economic deprivation of the large sections of the population (Davies, 2018). Moreover, the proliferation of facts and fact-producers is claimed to lead to trivialisation as an expected outcome, where experts themselves are not infallible as they are observed to be erroneous many times as well as they are open to change with new evidence becoming available (Baggini, 2017: 38-39, 77-80). Therefore, we are said to move beyond an era when a consensus about the content of truth was possible (Harsin, 2017: 515; Döveling et al. 2018). The historical references regarding the loss of trust in expertise and the institutional authority are also strongly affiliated with the rise of postmodern philosophy.

Accordingly, this dislocation can have new characteristics in the sense that although conceived to be utilized by progressive means earlier, the Foucauldian power-truth nexus can be said to be deconstructed and reformulated by the far-right for regressive ends (Gibson, 2018: 3177). The general political rhetoric of politicians, can be observed to be performative acts of the weaponization of truth in order to discredit their opponent’s version of truth and legitimize their own where new media technologies does not give birth, but enhance this condition. This strategy is not only limited to scientific knowledge but can be imported directly into the political realm where evidence based claims are reduced to a matter of politics (Andrejevic, 2013:26). Andrejevic points out that the aim of these strategies is not so much to offer a hegemonic counter-narrative but to use the expanded media space to absorb any dominant narrative in possible alternatives, to highlight the indeterminacy of the evidence by generating endless narratives of debunkery and counter-debunkery: not to speak truth but to highlight the contingency, indeterminateness and ultimately, the hopelessness of so-called truth in the face of power.

Advancement of technologies also created the breeding ground for more advanced forms of propaganda techniques such as click-bate, bot-farms, etc., conceived to be different than before. Andrejevic’s point (2013), where he highlights that new forms of power emerge alongside old forms of power is important, however it should be emphasized that, old forms of power does not transform into new forms of power but rather exist side-by-side. From the media angle, this can be observed rather clearly from the platform economics and the concentration of power at the hands of a few big social media companies exerting power on content as well as the hoax news stories (whether they have a strong impact on the persuasion of citizens or not), raise important normative questions about the underlying media infrastructures and industries- ad-tech firms and programmatic advertising that seem to create a lucrative incentive structure for the “fake news” (Braun & Eklund, 2019). This, therefore exist side-by-side with the intensified “weaponization of truth-claims”.

Moreover, what may make this dislocation a different one from before can be the wider recognition by the general public of the frailty and impotence of elites in the face of the rising inequalities and the insecurities as well as an arising sense of the need for self-reflection and reckoning from the establishment, from Silicon Valley technologists to liberal politicians from EU-policymakers to mainstream journalism and global business elites. As aforementioned, Vilfredo Pareto and Steve Fuller (2018) offer a very top-down perspective on the political system and history by not actually taking into account History from Below- the so-called people’s history. For example, Edward Palmer Thompson (1963) does this by acknowledging that forgotten people of the capitalist system have a right to a history and thus a perspective, demonstrating working class in control of their own making. Moreover, James Baldwin (1986) succinctly summarizes this in his great speech to the National Press Foundation in US, offering a critique of “The View from Here” that the educated classes, the bourgeoise are the only ones with access to the truth, and anything outside it threatens the social order. Therefore, while we take into account the current dislocation, it is not only important to consider the political communication, but also the historical reasons leading up to the current dislocation in more detail from a bottom-up political-economic framework. In this sense, it becomes important to notice that the failure of capitalism and the trickle down effect of Keynesian economics have created serious economic marginalisation through the years leaving rural towns in ruins, rendering many people devastated and unemployed. Nancy Fraser (2016) argues that this recent dislocation in fact points towards the shrinking of neoliberal hegemony, the rejection of globalization and the political establishments that have promoted them. People are not only against a combination of austerity, “free trade”, predatory debt, and precarious ill-paid work that characterize present-day financialized capitalism, so-called neoliberalism, but what they reject is progressive neoliberalism (ibid). In its US form, progressive neoliberalism is an alliance of “new social movements” on the one side, and the high-end “symbolic” and service-based business sectors (Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood), on the other. In this alignment, what passes for the forces of emancipation are effectively joined with the forces of cognitive capitalism (ibid.). Therefore, it is against this background that the current dislocation should be contextualized in the West.

Therefore, coming back to the post-truth condition, it can be observed that although multiplication of narratives, propaganda and lies have always existed, as far back as Ancient Greece, the current ecosystem of political communication and dislocation should be comprehended neither as a completely old phenomenon, nor as a completely new era that we find ourselves in, but a mélange of old characteristics combined with new patterns.

To claim truth or not to claim truth?

Nevertheless, in the face of the post-truth condition, various expert groups, academics, and politicians are attempting to provide initiatives to tackle it. Scholars like Bruno Latour are proposing to adopt a critically realist attitude in the face of the post-truth condition (Latour, 2004). William Davies, political-economically oriented scholar, argues that as the free market is a post-truth institution (impedes us from knowing what is really going on), considering human emotions seriously which have been long neglected and grant the suffering ones the right to speak is the ultimate condition for the truth (Davies, 2018). Des Freedman (2018: 615), on the other hand, argues that as the liberal media policy’s commitment to market forces, its privileging of corporate speech rights, its complicity with the establishment and its technocratic obsession for innovation is severely implicated in the growth of the reactionary movements, a new policy paradigm is needed to succeed the market-oriented approach delineated by Van Cuilenberg and McQuail (2003). Some of the more widely shared mainstream approaches involve proposing a call for a “pro-truth” society or endorsing fact-checking bureaus for reclaiming the facts at the centre of political decision-making which is imagined to unify the hyper-partisan and antagonistic divides (Farkas, 2020: 74). Elite liberal media institutions from BBC to New York Times to Google and Facebook are using the crisis articulated by the anti-establishment politics and argue with an anti-populist rhetoric that they are capable of sustaining a consensual, rational and credible information ecology that can expose “fake news” and protect established truths (Freedman & Fenton, 2018).

Nevertheless, the widespread thought on re-positioning facts at the centre of politics and re-claiming consensus-based democracy through gaining trust in governance, in theory may imply forfeiting certain truths at the expense of others by reaching an agreement through rational deliberation. However, as John Gray (2017) puts forward “this may absolve some liberals from the responsibility for their previous defeats and failures, while sustaining the comforting illusion that the supposed normality of the recent past can be retrieved if they fight harder for their certainties”. Importantly, Chantal Mouffe’s conceptualization of agonistic pluralism materializes on the fundamental hypothesis that democracy- as a political system- should not strive for consensus based on rational discussion, which is due to the condition that “any social objectivity is ultimately political” (Mouffe, 2000: 13) where any seemingly “neutral” or “objective” solution to any social issue will always come into existence as the result of power relations (Farkas, 2020: 71).

Every form of norm, policy, and mechanism of control come into existence from political struggles between conflicting discourses where no procedure, decision, or consensus can arise from pure rational thought, as all “agreements in opinions” must first depend on “agreements in forms of life” (Mouffe, 2000: 11). According to Mouffe, consensus-oriented democratic ideals depend on a fundamental fallacy and mis-conceptualization regarding democracy’s core function and justification of existence, its deficiency to recognize “the impossibility of finding rational impartial universal solutions to political issues but also the inherent role that conflict and antagonism plays in modern democracy” (Mouffe, 2005: 30–31). For agonistic pluralism, passions and beliefs that are conceived to be irrational by some do not have to be removed or suppressed from the political process for achieving the elusive rational consensus, on the contrary, passions should be mobilized towards democratic designs (Jones, 2014: 23). Emotions, therefore, also grant the people to have the agentic capacity for affiliative interpretation in politics and communication and if emotions are channelled towards progressive directions, they can mobilize the kinds of publics to create lasting change (Papachirissi, 2015).

Hence, to what extent re-claiming the rationality of the public debate in current times without taking into account emotions is a wise road to pursue? Despite the old Enlightenment faith in reason and expertise developed in the 17th century, as a hopeful and desperate response to the Thirty Years War, with philosophers like Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes that have pursued to build a foundation of truth that was separable from the vicissitudes of emotion, articulating sharp divisions between war and peace, and mind and body, nowadays there is a wider recognition of the breaking down of such distinctions in the West (Davies, 2018; Szalai, 2018). The proliferation of new technologies and forms of conflict such as terrorism and cyberwarfare have pushed the society into profound uncertainty and heightened alertness (Davies, 2018; Szalai, 2018). Therefore, the title of the book “Nervous States” by Will Davies (2018), refers not only to the anxiety that frequents political life these days but to the actual nervous system that mediates between body and mind, producing sensations like pain, arousal and excitement. However, feminist scholars have already been pointing out the importance of emotions to politics. As the emotions have long been associated with the personal, the body, the feminine, the constitutive other of the reason, the objective, the mind, the masculine, in Western binary modes of thinking, “emotion” has been and still is a political strategy keeping women and the feminine out of politics and political spheres (Åhäll, 2018). As a result, much of feminist scholarship has already worked to problematize binaries such as emotion/reason, mind/body, domestic/international. Importantly for a discussion of feminism and affect, feminist theory challenges knowledge as objective particularly through a focus on the importance of “being as a mode of knowing” (Åhäll, 2018).

Consequences for democracy and free speech

Therefore, if we ask the question “whose truth” or “which truth are we talking about” we can perceive that what is being observed in global politics is “facts” as a concept becoming increasingly politicized and weaponized to legitimize one’s own viewpoint and discredit the viewpoint of others in a highly polarized environment. In this environment, sometimes concepts such as post-truth or fake news or related concepts also get utilized for rhetorical purposes to discredit the viewpoints of opponents as well. If we perceive the circulation of different “truth-claims” equally, we may not claim personal allegiance to certain truth-claims, but we may think this does not deter the right and freedom of these truth-claims to circulate. This perspective then unintentionally aligns us with Brendan O’Neill’s position that “The most curious thing about the political class’s war in defence of truth is that, it co-exists with a war against freedom of speech…whether it is the technocrats of the EU or broadsheet thinkers bemoan a crisis of truth, claiming that a combination of demagoguers and populist myth-making has propelled the Modern West- into a post-truth era. Yet in the next, they express disdain for the ideal of unfettered free thought and debate. Whether they are insinuating laws against hate speech or enforcing social stigma against such things as climate change denial, or Europhobia, they demonstrate a palpable discomfort with the idea of a fully open public sphere in which nothing is unsayable” (O’Neill, 2017).

Going beyond this, I think, requires comprehending truth’s intrinsic relationship with power. There comes the importance of understanding whether the advancement of truth-claims as part of regressive, reactionary, affective identity politics are formulated and circulated to be in the service of certain political- economic agendas and complex profit-seeking alliances through taking advantage of libertarian conceptions of “freedom of speech”. Freedom of expression or freedom of speech may become a dangerous licence (Dwan, 2018), for example, if a citizen is continuously attacked due to skin colour, sexual orientation, faith, disability or gender and she/he probably will not be engaging in a free exchange of opinions. Also, if affective politics is utilized in issues such as climate change in order to gain the trust of citizens by dubbing “climate change as elite hysteria” in order to criticize multi-lateral cooperation for fighting climate change, this becomes problematic. Moreover, during COVID-19 pandemic, the prevalence of affect-laden anti-scientific, anti-vaccination discourses and illegitimate knowledge regarding thMoreover, during COVID-19 pandemic, the prevalence of affect-laden anti-scientific, anti-vaccination discourses and illegitimate knowledge regarding the virus pose a great risk to public health worldwide.

Kari Karppinen comments that both positive and negative conceptions of freedom of speech in fact contain idealizing assumptions. Libertarian, negative conceptions of free speech, he argues, typically tend to assume free speech exists when the state does not directly generate restrictions (Kenyon, 2014) where the metaphor of the free marketplace of ideas exists, in which the truth emerges as the result of open discussions occurring without any threat of censorship or governmental interference (Karppinen, 2019: 71). This is idealizing because, it tends to ignore the real circumstances that obstruct the use of public speech, such as market failures, self-censorship, and other psychological and ideological concerns (ibid: 71). On the other hand, positive conceptions of freedom, or notions of positive communication rights, can also be criticized for trying to develop predetermined lists of abstract, totalizing, universal preconditions or specific ends that “authentic”, or truly representative communicative freedom would involve. However, a “non-ideal” approach to communicative freedom, instead of a transcendental, absolute value, may render freedom, or notions like free speech as terms rooted in certain historical practices, institutional arrangements and privileges that they protect (Karppinen, 2016: 45).

According to Wendy Brown (1995:6), “freedom is neither a philosophical absolute nor a tangible entity but a relational and contextual practice that takes shape in opposition to whatever is locally and ideologically conceived as unfreedom”. For example, the emphasis on contested and partial nature of freedom, can be found in contemporary radical or agonistic theories of democracy where the underlying emphasis here is that the liberal model of the marketplace of ideas, but also the ideal conceptions of a rational and deliberative public sphere fail to address power and existing forms of exclusion (Karppinen, 2016: 47). As Kioupkiolis (2009: 484) argues, breaking free from the essentialism of modern conceptions of freedom may emphasize creative agency where this can imply, for example, support to minority and alternative media linked to social movements and other civil society actors, which provide space for critical voices and social perspectives that are excluded by currently dominant structures and styles of public speech.

However, although a critique of the rational consensus and evidence-based policy approaches of deliberative democracy is certainly realistic and vital, especially taking into account the growing lack of civic participation and confidence in political processes and established systems of governance coupled with the indifference of the system towards the political, social and economic demands of citizens, the approaches that heavily glorify the affective affiliation and passions in politics like agonistic pluralism has the tendency to over emphasize affect and somehow degrade the degree of rational discussion necessary to proper politics. This points the necessity to conceptualize “affective rationalities” or “conflictual consensus”. Such concerns become especially relevant, when it becomes realized that affect gets employed not only for purposes of inclusivity, pluralism, diversity, anti-racism and anti-misogyny but also for intentionally manipulating (taking still into account the agency of citizens) the consent of citizens for strategic political ends.

The truth claims can be treated equally from the outside and can be given their space to a certain degree in the public debate but this never confirms the assignment of the same level of truth value in every circulating truth-claim. Some truths should matter more than others. Going beyond claims such as tackling broader economic inequalities and subsequent resentments, information abundance, climate change, hate speech and misogyny requires dealing with and discussing related issues on a more multi-dimensional level and with greater socially relevant participation by citizens both regarding internet platforms but also in politics and everyday life. By taking into account the non-ideal comprehensions of freedom of speech as well as the tensions between the agonistic and deliberative models, what needs to be done from communication and politics angle is more empirical research especially in country and context specific means regarding “the performative acts of weaponized truth-claims” in political discourses as well as responsive policies but also importantly the citizen practices, participation and perceptions in relation to the news media and political environment which have the potential to enrich the academic scholarship further.