Hello everyone……
This blog is based on a Sunday reading task assigned by dilip barad sir, in which I'm going to deal with the topic post-truth.
What is post truth ?
relating to or existing in an environment in which facts are viewed as irrelevant, or less important than personal beliefs and opinions, and emotional appeals are used to influence public opinion.
ORIGIN OF POST-TRUTH
First recorded in 1990–95; post- + truth
Also post-fact, post-fac·tu·al .
WORDS NEARBY POST-TRUTH
Posttown,post-transcriptional,post-translational,post-traumatic, post-traumatic,stress-disorder, post-truth,post-typhoid, postulancy, postulant postulate, postulate.
Facts and Politics
If we are to understand current politics, I argue, critical scholars need to supplement the prevalent 'social construction of the factual approach with a more polyvalent take on truth and factuality. I suggest that Hannah Arendt's distinction between rational and factual truths, although it simplifies a lot, is helpful for understanding post- truth. Rational truths are truths whose opposite is not a lie, but illusion and opinion (philosophical truths) or error and ignorance (scientific truths). They also contain the Platonic 'true standard of human conduct. Rational truths, Arendt argues, are rarely politically relevant.
What we should be concerned about is the fate of factual truths. They indeed 'constitute the very texture of the political realm'. By facts, Arendt does not primarily mean what Mary Poovey has called 'modern facts - namely, numerical representations of scientific and technocratic knowledge. On the contrary, facts emerge from the deeds of plural human beings, as the Latin word factum (things made, deed, action) suggests. This close relationship to action makes them contingent. Since action is free, facts have 'no conclusive reason for being what they are.
Because of their contingent origin and the dependence on witnessing, facts are highly fragile and vulnerable. If we lose a set of particular facts, 'no rational effort will ever bring them back.
Factual truth is mostly about modest verities of the Mohamed Bouazizi self-immolated on 17 December 2010 type. Given their dependence on testimony and storytelling, their existence is without a doubt socially constructed. In politics, Arendt argued, appearances constitute reality. Accordingly, I argue, facts must also be seen as real, yet not as reflections of things as they are prior to any contact with human perspectives. There are no absolute criteria demarcating truth from opinion, value, or the frame/discourse within which the facts are placed or from which they emerge. Yet, facts have a curious peremptory quality to them - they can even haunt us. The etymology of the Latin facturis rooted in the word fieri, which refers to becoming; hence, facts are what inescapably has become the reality for us.
In terms of epistemic validity, most scholars (and others) tend to - at least implicitly and performatively - subscribe to some form of 'everyday realism' when it comes to facts in the abovementioned category. A sceptic might argue, nevertheless, that the types of factual truth just described are mostly irrelevant. The verities they contain are so "modest" that nothing interesting follows from them. Such an argument needlessly deprecates the political role of factual truth. It assumes facts should be capable of directly dictating policies lest they are doomed to irrelevance. But as Arendt points out, the role of facts is to inform opinions, to constitute the common reference point for widely differing opinions 'inspired by different interests and passions. Facts themselves become meaningful only through the process of exchanging opinions about them.
Such agonal understanding of facts has nothing to do with the liberal marketplace of ideas, which is sometimes evoked as a process that leads to the truth in the public sphere. Nor is the truth about sharing a set of values in the sense of post-historical liberal consensus. Instead of being distilled from the plurality of perspectives, truth invites.
Accounting for Post-truth
According to a study of US politics conducted at the RAND Corporation, what makes the current situation potentially unique is the mistrust of information sources and the lack of shared facts. This, among other factors, makes possible the success of careless speech. Facts have often in history yielded to prejudices and subjective whims, but in the RAND study, no clear precedents were found in the US history for the current major disagreement over basic facts and their interpretations. Also mistrust of commonly recognized reliable sources of information 'seems to be more pronounced now'.
Some blame intellectual currents of these developments. I argue on the contrary that the issue comes down to more mundane questions regarding the changes in the economy-media-politics complex and the increasing overlap between the three areas of that complex. Indeed, Americans' trust in the mass media has dropped from 72% in 1976 (after Watergate/Vietnam) to 32% today. At the same time, visual media have almost completely replaced written words. The daily circulation of newspapers in the US has dropped to 36,7% of households in 2010 from 123,6% (sic) in the 1950s.
Equally important as the falling credibility of the media is the amalgam of media, economic rationality, and politics in the form of Public Relations (PR) that has slowly evolved to its current form during the twentieth century. PR is essentially about carefully crafted public images. Hence it is linked more directly to bullshit than to careless speech.
PR is a crucial element, however, in creating the structural conditions that allow careless speech to bloom.
Writing as a response to the Pentagon papers in the 1970s, Arendt warned that due to the mass-mediated nature of our society, the image created by PR practices is usually much more visible than the 'original'. The image begins to substitute for reality. It does not matter whether policies lead to any hoped-for tangible outcomes as long as the audience', when they form their judgments, can be made to summon up the image crafted for media circulation rather than 'the stark, naked brutality of facts, of things as they are. Indeed, this can at times be the explicit aim of PR.
In addition to the PR campaigns for politicians, the US has seen the emergence of a highly organised PR industry serving corporate interest by falsehoods and socially engineered science denial. In Russia, several commentators have described the unique reality of post-Soviet capitalism in terms of living in a simulated reality. Such a PR industry has proven extremely capable of manipulating the media and having an impact on their mode of operation. Both media and citizens have increasingly adopted the view that there are always two sides to an issue and hence no definitive truth as such. For Arendt, this can give rise to a peculiar kind of cynicism in which we refuse to believe any truths, no matter how well established. Such cynicism can have devastating consequences. It destroys "the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world - and the category of truth vs. falsehood is among the mental means to this end".
Russia is an enthralling example here. A combination of state controlled TV and a general ethos of moulding reality, as pictured by Peter Pomerantsev and the novels of Viktor Pelevin, create a world in which everything is PR, or as Pomerantsev title has it, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible. The political technologies applied by Putin seek to create the impression that everybody is lying anyway, so political struggle becomes a matter of creating the best lies and the most appealing character.
Besides PR, two things in the politics-economy-media complex are worth emphasising. First, in the last 50 years. the very concept of news has undergone tremendous change. Up until 1960s and 1970s, news programming had not yet adopted the idea of constant streaming or, even more importantly, of making profit. This left much more time for background work and investigative journalism. Since the 1970s, however, cable news, 24-hour news cycle, and the idea of making profit have turned news into entertainment. And it turns out that controversy and collusion of pre-determined opinions is more entertaining that facts.
In the last decade, social media has added its own twist to this. Many scholars have pointed out that social media amplifies bias, provides distractions and makes us less receptive to inconvenient facts. In the 2016 election, it was also apparent that social media allowed the creation of a radical right-wing media ecosystem capable of insulating its followers from nonconforming news and building active links to conspiracy sites.
Finally, to conclude on a more speculative note, it is worth considering how the transformation of the economy affects our general experience of reality. We live in a world defined by service and experience centred economy. If my comparison of facts to the physical environment holds, we might wonder to what extent our relation to facts resonates with the increasingly fluid, affective, and ambivalent role of physical objects in our lives in the age of on-demand streaming of affective experiences. We increasingly consume images and experiences rather than physical objects. Thus, we increasingly experience things in their stubbornness. Perhaps we also want to stream our personalised, on-demand 'facts'.
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