Abstract
Today’s most prominent discussions of post-truth are united by a kernel of nostalgia, framing the present time as one of cognitive and moral decay and as open to abuse by populists. Meanwhile, this chapter demonstrates that the true object of nostalgia is, instead, the detached and disembodied rational Cartesian subject. Hence, instead of diagnosing the problems facing today’s societies, the mainstream discourse on post-truth manifests close affinities with its own object of critique—(frequently nostalgic) populism. Instead of focusing on a singular truth that has to be made great again, the political landscape postulated in this chapter is one populated by a multitude of truth-utterances, interrelating with each other on a groundless terrain without the possibility of an ultimate fixed order or grounding truth in what is conceptualized as the tragic domain of politics. Only then, it is argued, can a truly pluralist account of political discourse be embraced.
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Introduction
Discussions of post-truth have underpinned attempts to understand contemporary politics for already nearly a decade. Nevertheless, the dominant interpretations of post-truth fail to fully capture the nature and meaning of this phenomenon and, therefore, to provide a politically productive theory of post-truth. That is because of the nostalgic nature of such accounts: they, either implicitly or explicitly, emphasize ‘post-truth’ as a retreat from the Enlightenment ideal of objective reason, as an irruption of the emotional masses into the epicentre of agenda-setting—either through communicative actions of populist politicians—or as a result of technological change (or both in tandem). Paradoxically, such thinking is structurally identical with the populism those same authors aim to criticize: effectively, truth has allegedly been undermined and, therefore, supposedly has to be made great again, while those in defence of truth need to take back control. By contrast, this chapter calls for an alternative view of politics as a tragic domain in which individuals and groups may compete and suffer, but ultimately in vain due to the underlying groundlessness of social life. As a result, post-truth should better be seen as a moment of unconcealment, as the becoming-evident of the impossibility of privileged subjects and privileged knowledge positions.
The chapter is structured as follows. First, the mainstream depictions of post-truth are reviewed, focusing on their nostalgic character and the emergent dichotomies of good versus evil that underpin the supposed epochal nature of post-truth. The second part of the chapter deals with the criticisms of the dominant narrative as misguided nostalgia for a non-existent ideal. Finally, in order to move beyond the humanist focus on a single superior reason, an alternative, tragic take on politics is developed.
Nostalgic Post-truth and Epochal Shifts
Inasmuch as attempts to describe and conceptualize the current conditions of political and social life are concerned, there is a clear tendency to rely on fundamental dichotomies that portray the world as a battlefield between good and evil or, as Hannon (2023, p. 57) puts it, ‘a clash between truth and the forces of darkness’. As shown below, most of the mainstream discourse on post-truth can be seen as a variation on the same theme but also imbued with a strong sense of nostalgia: the good is in the past, the evil is in the present.
There is indeed a tendency to take ‘post-truth’ literally, as signifying that ‘the time of truth has passed’, that truth is now disregarded by a sufficient part of the population (Barton, 2019, p. 1025) or that, simply put, ‘the truth doesn’t seem to matter’ anymore (Ferretti, 2023). Similarly, Kavanagh and Rich (2018) focus on what they call ‘truth decay’ as comprising an ever-growing disagreement over facts, decreasing individuals’ ability to contain opinions and personal experiences to the private sphere or even to differentiate them from objective information, and receding trust in traditional sources of information. Similarly, post-truth is taken to characterize a condition whereby ‘people consider opinion to be as legitimate as objective facts, or when they weigh emotional factors as heavily as statistical evidence’ (Ball, 2017, pp. 179–180; Mcdermott, 2019, pp. 179–180). Likewise, in d’Ancona’s (2017, p. 31) framing, the very project of modernity is in danger as ‘emotion is reclaiming its primacy and truth is in retreat’. Hence, post-truth is presented as an era characterized by not only an ‘epidemic of lying infecting public discourse’ but also, even more fundamentally, ‘[t]he wanton disregard for truth and the abnegation of values and virtues that undergird its pursuit’ (Ferretti, 2023, p. 316; see also Ghosh, 2022), leading to the notion of post-truth as ‘relativistic arbitrariness’ (Hainscho, 2023). Similarly, for Bufacchi (2021, p. 349), post-truth ‘doesn’t simply deny or question certain facts, but aims to undermine the theoretical infrastructure that makes it possible to have a conversation about the truth’, thereby closing off options for a renaissance of truth.
As per above, there is a deep sense of nostalgia for what are framed as better, more rational times. For example, as McIntyre (2018, p. 17) puts it, ‘[o]nce respected for the authority of its method, scientific results are now openly questioned by legions of nonexperts who happen to disagree with them’. There is a definite sense of longing in assertions that ‘[h]istorically important concepts such as rationality and autonomy […] have virtually disappeared’ as have values central to the development and evaluation of human character (Hoggan-Kloubert & Hoggan, 2023, p. 16). In other words, claims the loss of rationality and its replacement with emotional frenzy have become essentially de rigueur (see also Brunkhorst, 2024). The narrative of societal decay from a preferable past to a lamentable present is clearly visible here (see also de Saint Laurent et al., 2017; Enroth, 2023). Coextensively, the disintegration of consensus over what counts as truth and what criteria and methods can be used to establish something as truth is seen as leading to the dominance of biases and the public being at a liberty to ignore inconvenient facts (Foroughi et al., 2019, p. 140). Indeed, as a sign of derogation from established ideals, post-truth supposedly enables individuals ‘to choose their own reality, where facts and objective evidence are trumped by existing beliefs and prejudices’ (Lewandowsky et al., 2017, p. 224). In this new world, ‘popularity and tribal affinity rather than impersonal logic and evidence’ are seen as crucial selection criteria (Hannan, 2018, p. 224).
The mainstream discourse on post-truth can also be seen as strongly hierarchical, establishing a pecking order not only between different kinds of knowledge but also between segments of society. Post-truth is presented as an inferior, ‘have nots version’ of knowledge that is characterized by narrow instrumentality rather than by generalizability and universality (Andrejevic, 2020, pp. 32–33). In this way, both the worldview characterized as post-truth and its adherents are simultaneously rendered inferior to those passing judgement. In the same vein, others focus on what they see as the weakness and gullibility of individuals who simply choose to go with more palatable, or satisfying, statements and assertions that confirm their preexisting opinions (Foroughi et al., 2019, p. 140; see also Lewandowsky et al., 2017, pp. 359–360; Schindler, 2020, p. 392). There is also a notion of moral decay not only in terms of turning one’s back to truth as an independent value in and of itself, but also by way of equating truth with the common good; hence, the alleged undermining of truth would lead to a corresponding undermining of the public good as well (Ferretti, 2023, p. 306). Hence, turning away from traditional truth hierarchies and mistrusting them, and opting for the emotional appeal of statements instead, is generally seen as a predetermined path towards the tearing apart of societies at the hands of populists (see e.g. Baier, 2024). Such assertions, however, fail to critically reflect on who defines the constitution of the public good in the first place.
In much of mainstream discourse on post-truth, the other side’s inferiority gets conflated with a supposed political threat. For example, Koekoek and Zakin (2023) focus on what they see as a ‘fundamentally anti-democratic’ nature of post-truth. Post-truth is thus seen as ‘deplorable’ and as making facts contingent upon political interests and considerations (McIntyre, 2018, pp. 9–11). Similarly, post-truth is seen as neither self-serving nor independently occurring but, instead, as brought about by political and social actors seeking to profiteer from it; such actors, it is claimed, erode societies’ ability to efficiently deal with the challenges facing them by way of ‘constant sophisticated attempts to confuse and dupe’ (Harsin, 2019, p. 102). Likewise, Hopkin and Rosamond (2018, p. 461) put the blame on ‘[t]he rise of populist and anti-elitist movements’ that contribute to ‘the rejection of basic principles of reason and veracity’, while a similar sentiment is also echoed in Bufacchi’s (2021, p. 354) assertion that ‘post-truth is an invention of the powerful, not the powerless’. Also, for Nally (2023), the fragmentation, disorientation, and outright cynicism resulting from post-truth make citizens powerless to execute any real change. Hence, the discourse is simultaneously nostalgic and continues the trend towards hierarchization (erosion takes place because some are unable to handle democracy and ruin it for everyone else).
Nevertheless, it must also be stressed that human weaknesses are often seen not in isolation but as technologically augmented. Hence, a major strand of criticism is directed against the technological infrastructure of everyday life, with online platforms and other means of digital content delivery deserving particular attention. For example, as Shepard (2022, p. 2) claims, ‘[the] post-truth world is fuelled by the affordances of social media’. The latter are seen to result in publics succumbing to ‘autonomous digital systems capable of exerting force outside of human control’. In particular, emphasis is put on decontextualization of information and algorithmic content governance through prediction of individual preferences based on their data (Syvertsen, 2020, p. 38). On the one hand, algorithms are useful complexity-reducing tools that come to their own, particularly as a result of the large volume, velocity, and variety of content today: as Amoore (2020, p. 156) states, algorithms transform ‘the intractable difficulties and duress of living, the undecidability of what could be happening […], into a single human-readable and actionable meaning’. On the other hand, they can easily make individuals lose track of content alternatives by siloing them in reams of content compatible with their data profiles. A similar view is also put forward by Shepard (2022, p. 3) who stresses that as algorithms ‘maximize user engagement through shares and likes’, they end up ‘promoting the proliferation of post-truth terrain across the network’. In particular, the ability to algorithmically micro-target users with digitally manufactured content is seen as a major new threat (Cotter et al., 2021; Dobber et al., 2021; Thorson et al., 2021). The net result then could be the creation of a fake impression of consensus within an in-group (Chadwick & Stanyer, 2022), resulting in the development of a false view of the world and a shared reality, audience understanding of their self-interest, notions of right and wrong, stirring up specific emotions—all of that for the benefit of those in control of or with access to the technological means of directing the flow of information (Susskind, 2018, p. 143). Hence, the availability of user data and the capacity for nimble and unobtrusive digital content governance create the conditions to imperceptibly nudge individuals towards predetermined choices (Mills, 2022; Yeung, 2017). Such nudging is seen to rely on the predictive capacity of technology companies—knowing in advance what makes audiences tick to the extent of exerting control over psycho-cognitive processes, including in the political domain (Han, 2017; Zuboff, 2019). While there certainly are important insights to be gained from critical studies of technology and their socio-political influence, the focus on the digital layer of today’s life only serves to strengthen the supposed dichotomies between those who are immune and those who are gullible.
Nevertheless, there still is a very real tendency to the focus on technology. Individuals have to deal with ‘a deluge of information’ despite not having the necessary resources to fully process all of the content available to them (Ecker, 2019, p. 80). It is the surge of content, both reliable and not, that, it tends to be claimed, overwhelms human cognitive capacities, leaving individuals unable to adequately deal with information and, therefore, vulnerable to disinformation (Cosentino, 2023). Similarly, Dahlgren (2018, p. 26) stresses ‘high velocity and dizzying excess’ as paradigmatic features of today’s information environment. However, this is neither a completely new phenomenon (although one significantly exacerbated by the ubiquity of connectivity and the speed of digital content proliferation) nor should it be interpreted as an assertion of a reduction in human cognitive and informational capacities. Instead, as subsequently shown, it is the very expectation of ‘adequate’ information processing that is misguided and unrealistic. Other commonly stressed issues include the absence of gatekeeping in today’s information environment, which is taken to mean that instead of the public interest, information supply channels serve the biases and content expectations of their audiences, leading to the fragmentation of societies (McDermott, 2019, pp. 2–3). Contemporary social media-centric information environment thus becomes seen as an ‘attention factory’ (Valaskivi, 2022). While for most, the above is typically taken to lead towards societal fragmentation, polarization, and disintegration, others tend to focus on how technological tools and artefacts can be used to manufacture and mobilize support and consent (Woolley, 2023). Nevertheless, whichever effect is taken to be the point of reference, the overall sentiment remains, yet again, a nostalgic one: of a more robust and reliable public sphere having been pulled from under society’s feet and traditional truth conventions been undermined.
Given the preceding characteristics, it is unsurprising that one encounters a perceived need to ‘fight against Post-Truth’ (Bufacchi, 2021, p. 357), sometimes even replacing the ostensibly lost rationality with a synthetic one, i.e. computational tools for tracking and removing content that deviates from pre-established norms (see e.g. Carley, 2020). For others, meanwhile, a stark choice is looming: you are either with the Enlightenment (i.e. rationality and Truth-with-a-capital-T) or you are with the ‘charlatans’ (d’Ancona, 2017, p. 5). The stakes here can hardly be higher. And yet, such dramatic nostalgia is not the only game in town, as more critical voices have started to raise questions and concerns about the currently dominant frames.
Why (Post-)Truth Is Not What It Seems
Already early on, there have been attempts to counter the then-emerging discourse on post-truth, referring to it as, for example, ‘elitist and obnoxious’, an excuse for not ‘selling’ tough policies (Brown, 2016), a patronizing attempt by the elites to find an excuse for failing to get their point across (Fox, 2016). While initially such voices failed to get mainstream traction, more recently, attempts to reconsider post-truth have become increasingly prominent, signalling if not a turn of the tide, then at least an opportunity to have a less one-sided discussion about the nature and effects of post-truth.
As Harjuniemi (2022, p. 272) points out, the current discourse on post-truth, almost without exception, ends up with some conjugation of lamentations pertaining to the loss of an Enlightenment model of truth to which the idealized rational individual was supposed to have direct access. There clearly seems to be a simplistic reliance on seemingly ‘clear-cut distinctions between the esteemed objective realm of facts, science, and reason and the dangerous subjective realm of emotions, ideology, and irrationality’ (Harambam et al., 2022, p. 787). Likewise, for Marres, the typical accounts of post-truth have ‘an element of nostalgia’ for imaginary better times of dominant truth-telling and unquestionable authority (Marres, 2018, pp. 423–424). Indeed, the idea that one only has to somehow ‘return to truth’ rests on assumptions that are both practically and ideologically naïve (Hainscho, 2023; Uscinski & Enders, 2023). Ultimately, then, the dominant accounts of post-truth can be criticized for simplistically delving into ‘a baseless nostalgia for a by-gone era characterized by truth and reason’ (Harjuniemi, 2022, p. 279). Almost identically, for Hannon (2023, pp. 48–49), ‘[t]he idea of post-truth implies a nostalgia for an age of facts, a time when politics supposedly had little to do with emotions or personal opinions and instead revolved around evidence, objectivity, and rationality’. Overall, then, one can easily sense a rather conservative outlook in mainstream thinking on post-truth.
Similarly, Altay and Acerbi (2023, p. 14) criticize the propensity to embrace ‘alarmist narratives about the prevalence and impact of misinformation’. However, it is also important to note that misinformation, post-truth, fake news, etc., always belong to the domain of the other—it is others who create and proliferate untruths and others who fall for them (Strassheim, 2023; see also Altay & Acerbi, 2023; Uscinski & Enders, 2023). In this way, conceptualization of post-truth and, crucially, the labelling of the other as post-truth acts as a way of establishing boundaries and stopping the conversation. This is not to suggest that assertions of people holding patently wrong beliefs or relying on emotional criteria and prior beliefs are completely unfounded (although the mainstream interpretation of such tendencies is); neither should the rejection of the nostalgic version of post-truth and the associated alarmist claims be taken to imply that ‘anything goes’. Instead, the main criticism is that the currently dominant academic discourse on post-truth is both ahistorical and blind to its own ideological assumptions.
In this context, Sloman and Fernbach (2017, p. 257) are blunt in their assessment: for them, ignorance is ‘inevitable’, even a ‘natural state’ of human existence that ensues from the unavoidable complexity of the world. While this assertion is valuable in pointing towards a more nuanced understanding of the matter at hand, it is still insufficiently productive due to the use of a very loaded term ‘ignorance’. Indeed, such assertions, as well as the customary use of ‘post-truth’ as a stigmatizing label can be seen as questionable from both political and ethical standpoints: instead of allowing fellow citizens to stand on an equal footing, such practices a priori delegitimize and contemptuously dismiss their concerns while supposing that ‘we’ know better and have privileged access to reality (Hannon, 2023, p. 54). In this way, a dangerous dichotomy is established—one that is used to rhetorically and politically separate ‘those who are worthy of political influence (the informed elite) and those who are unworthy (the misguided masses)’ (Hannon, 2023, p. 54). Crucially, such delimitation also tends to overlap with preexisting deprivation, stratification, and discrimination, only strengthening them through ascription of an alleged lack of objective non-emotional reason and political capacity (Blackman, 2022, p. 61).
However, people are bound to have divergent views of reality that correspond with their lived experience and socio-political alignment (Uscinski & Enders, 2023). Here one needs to keep in mind that the key explanatory and sense-making unit for humans generally is not an isolated verifiable fact or even a set thereof. Instead, it is a narrative: as Holmstrom asserts, ‘truth, as in a fact or piece of information, has no intrinsic value’ but, instead, ‘[i]t is up to the narrative to create that value’ (Holmstrom, 2015, p. 124). Similarly, for Baron (2018, p. 73), success in a goal-oriented activity, such as politics, depends less on the quality of the evidence presented, and more on the meaning produced by the actors in question. The central driving factor here is the existential need to give meaning to the world and establish the coherence of one’s lived experience (Bonetto & Arciszewski, 2021). Finding an apparently fitting explanation to what is (or seems to be) going on in the world and the ensuing abundance of (newly found) meaning can also explain sharing behaviour, whereby individuals become inclined to proliferate the narratives they have found to be important to them (Wanless & Berk, 2020).
The above also has clear implications with regard to competition over (different takes on) truth. Hence, a narrative that is, for whatever reason, undesirable can be dislodged not by offering more facts or by extensive verification alone, but by offering a more potent meaning-establishing narrative (Ecker, 2019, p. 82). It also transpires that the more meaning individuals attach to particular narratives or points of view, the more resistant they are to revising them, as doing so would involve relinquishing a fundamental part of one’s identity (Vidigal & Jerit, 2022). Nevertheless, this should be taken as a recurring feature of human thinking (contrary to the Cartesian ideal of abstract disembodied reason engaged in a detached and rational understanding of the world) rather than a sign of the present times. In addition, as Newman (2023, p. 16) stresses, pleasure plays a crucial role in choosing among truth-claims in a competitive marketplace of ideas. Nevertheless, while he intends the preceding observation as a criticism of post-truth, there is more nuance to pleasure because it functions as a motivating and enabling force in politics. In fact, the classic Cartesian-style vilification of emotions only serves to undermine the way in which the latter act as ‘important sources of knowledge about power, oppression and governance’ (Blackman, 2022, p. 61). Unsurprisingly, then, Hainscho (2023) sees conviction and passionate dedication as being key to political contestation, even in times of so-called fake news. Citizens seem to be no less committed to the idea of truth and their own version of truth, even though there may be less agreement over what actually is true (Hannon, 2023). In this sense, post-truth cannot be interpreted as dominated by detachment or cynicism—on the contrary, it has to be seen as characterized by incessant competition over meaning and, therefore, pleasure.
Koekoek and Zakin (2023, p. 127) are right to point out a typical fallacy in the mainstream critiques of post-truth—their tendency to emerge ‘from a liberal, managerial, technocratic or hyper-rationalist perspective that […] kicks out the affective and emotional’; while otherwise critical of post-truth, they also stress the danger of succumbing to an epistemocracy that cloaks itself in the alleged self-evidence of reason and facts but, instead, ‘represents another fundamentally anti-democratic move insofar as it makes acquiescence to a particular knowledge regime a condition of ‘good citizenship’. Likewise, Fuller (2021, p. 352) criticizes opposition to post-truth as merely a technocracy-focused ‘epistemocratic oligarchy’. Hence, McIntyre fails to grasp the crux of the matter when he claims that ‘[i]n its purest form, post-truth is when one thinks that the crowd’s reaction actually does change the facts about a lie’ (McIntyre, 2018, p. 9). The error here is on two interconnected levels: first, the assumption of an idealized dichotomy between truth and ‘a lie’ and, second, the focus on factuality in discourse. The truth/lie distinction rests upon the presence of a detached rational subject capable of a bird’s eye view of the matter at hand; meanwhile, the fact-centricity of discourse assumes the independent legitimizing value of grounding discourse in a verifiable reality, i.e. that a discourse is tenable only to the extent that it is grounded in facts, and that for alternative framings of reality to be equally tenable the facts have to somehow change accordingly.
While emphasis is often on the intentional spread of disinformation as a conscious attempt to deceive, it must be kept in mind that this is by far not the only motivation: in fact, much of the sharing takes place under the mistaken assumption that the content in question is true or, even when the content is known to be fake, deceit may not necessarily be the goal (see e.g. Perach et al., 2023). Individuals thus may engage in sharing fake content out of a perceived need and public interest (in order to ‘spread the news’ or in order to combat perceived biases, advocate for specific issues) but also with narrower interests in mind (such as maintenance of in-group cohesion), or as a matter of parody, satire, or other humorous uses (which may also serve political, rather than narrowly self-gratifying, purposes), even if the humorous aspect might be lost on others. For this reason, the treatment of post-truth discourse as a unitary phenomenon characterized by a clear and easy distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ or ‘the good’ and ‘the bad’, risks false righteousness and further polarization.
Notably, the structure of argumentation behind mainstream accounts of post-truth demonstrated in this chapter closely mimics that of one of its main targets—populism. As a form of political discourse, populism builds upon discontinuities between present experience and idealized versions of group past, thereby eliciting nostalgia (Wohl et al., 2023), a sense of the past being the answer to today’s perceived ills (Ding et al., 2021). This collectively imagined past is then framed as the model to be reclaimed, thereby entering into an antagonistic relationship with those in support of alternative visions, potentially even framing the latter as an existential threat (Wohl et al., 2023), as having somehow ‘stolen’ the object of desire at the core of such imaginary past (Schreurs, 2021). Naturally, pessimism about the present, a sense of it having been degraded (especially by out-groups) becomes the default outlook (Steenvoorden & Harteveld, 2018), thereby again sharing key affinities with the mainstream discourse on post-truth. Despite engaging in a highly sentimental framing of the past, such evocations of nostalgia are also highly politically potent, enabling groups to shift the blame for their current alleged lack of privilege (van Prooijen et al., 2022). Likewise, critiques of populism have the tendency to portray its adherents as gullible and easily misled, susceptible to emotions, irrational, and otherwise politically inferior (Galanopoulos & Stavrakakis, 2022), also not unlike portrayals of the adherents of post-truth. Notably, the object of nostalgia can be completely fluid, enabling populists on both the political left and right to articulate their own objects to be missed and revered; not only that—in Central and Eastern Europe, for example, local context-specific versions, such as communist nostalgia, have been shown to contribute to the spread of both populism and conspiracy theories (Buzalka, 2018; Ramonaitė, 2023). In other cases, imperial nostalgia or other forms of an idealized (and even revered) past can perform the same role (e.g. on populism and Ottoman nostalgia in Türkiye, see Elçi, 2022). In fact, it could even be claimed that nostalgia is an omnipresent and largely ideology-agnostic element in political discourse (Kenny, 2017). Should nostalgia, above anything else, be reframed as the key variable, one that could subsequently postulate a general framework of longing, the objects of which—including, but not limited to, political power, forms of societal organization, material wealth, singular Truth—only appear to hold a central signifying value but, instead, are dependent on context, outlook, and ideology.
Indeed, the aspect of nostalgia has been ignored in the calls to decouple post-truth and populism (see e.g. De Cleen, 2018; Waisbord, 2018). Instead, the power of nostalgia should be seen as a key element in the appeals of populism, post-truth, and also in critiques thereof. However, post-truth is, in a way (and highly paradoxically, when seen from the mainstream perspective), more authentic than its critiques since, through its practice (though certainly not rhetoric), it ultimately unmasks the futility of capital-T-Truth in societal interactions. This is certainly not to say that post-truth (or its close relative populism) cannot be given a dangerous or even violent spin by those who practice and preach their particular manifestations. However, the preceding does contribute to answering the question of what, if any, meaning can be derived from post-truth and what, if any, role the concept can play in interpreting political reality. Crucially, critique of how post-truth is framed does not have to mean a rejection of the term itself. Notably, ‘post-truth’ remains a useful term, but not in the way it is typically framed. Instead of a nostalgic attitude that laments the loss of access to some timeless universal idea of truth and, therefore, to the world ‘as it really is’ and implying, along the way, a sense of loss of human cognitive capacity and even willingness to know ‘the truth’, one should interpret the preceding objects of nostalgia as futile fantasies of Enlightenment origin. A more productive rendering of post-truth would imply going beyond such idealized versions of truth and the human capacity for it—literally going beyond truth in the Enlightenment sense. Hence, instead of referring to a time when things come tumbling down, post-truth should be taken to denote a condition in which traditional models of knowledge become unmasked as having never truly worked, even though for many this remains difficult to acknowledge.
Notably, when assessing ways to deal with the vicissitudes of today’s political discourse, attention often tends to shift the blame onto the role of digital platforms as key communication infrastructures in homogenizing political discourse. In particular, social media companies are often seen as responsible for policing fake content and egregious forms of political speech, often criticizing the ways in which private corporate actors lack a normative commitment to the public interest despite their strong influence in the public arena (Jungherr & Schroeder, 2023, p. 167). Nevertheless, for the platforms themselves, there may be conflicting demands between freedom of expression and community wellbeing; hence, platforms, as well as other actors within the digital ecosystem, have to make their choice as to where they place themselves on a continuum that has maximum free expression at one end and maximum community cohesion at the other (Myers West, 2018). While not arguing for platforms as lawless spaces, outsourcing to them the status of (automated) arbiters of truth would come with threats of their own—essentially, establishing truth monopolies within their walled gardens.
It is often counterargued that bias and partiality can be reduced or even eliminated through machine learning, i.e. allowing predictive policing algorithms to learn patterns that indicate a likelihood of an undesirable activity or events potentially occurring with the aim of pre-empting them. Nevertheless, such AI-enabled detection patterns still remain susceptible to problems pertaining to the selection of training data, societal biases that even impartially curated data may still reflect (Kaufmann et al., 2019). Moreover, no machine learning tool can be reasonably expected to address the root causes of any problems. In addition, discourse homogenization through automation also has the effect of the indirect responsibilization of users themselves, as they are forced to police their own speech or have content removed by automated content moderation tools, often with limited ability to appeal (Gorwa et al., 2023). For this reason, it is crucial to develop a normative framework to undergird the politics of disagreement, even in terms of ground truths, provided that the actors involved are putting forward their honest interpretations of the world (intentional attempts to manipulate and mislead would be a wholly different matter).
The Tragic Nature of Truth and Politics
In terms of normative ideals to guide political thinking, development of a robust, inclusive, and responsive democracy would hardly seem controversial. And yet, it is precisely such qualities that the dominant discourse on post-truth potentially undermines. As Hannon (2023, p. 14) stresses, ‘[t]he rhetoric of post-truth often implies that political truths are self-evident, incontrovertible, and closed to reasonable disagreement’; the underlying assumption is, therefore, that decision-making in politics is relatively straightforward, uncontroversial, or even technocratic, thereby externalizing the burden and blame on citizens—or some groups thereof—who, it seems, ‘willfully choose bad policies or are hapless dupes’. Indeed, when someone is criticized as siding with post-truth, particularly from a position of power and status quo, it becomes an act of setting and maintaining boundaries between those who are allowed to possess the capacity for having a voice and those who are not (Marres, 2018, pp. 428–429). As Blackman (2022, p. 61) points out, association with the affective dimension (and, coextensively, with the lack of reason) has traditionally been the means by which ‘the working classes, colonial subjects, women, children and people with different sexualities’ have been excluded from the public sphere and from any supposedly common political project, and is thereby again used as a boundary line in the framing of contemporary politics. Crucially, while the critics of post-truth often label the latter as anti-democratic, it is their own discourse that manifests clear anti-democratic peculiarities by dismissing the very possibility of alternatives to the established elite discourse and to assumptions that have acquired a for-granted status (Hannon, 2023, p. 16).
Of course, intuitively (at least for minds that have been preconditioned for an Enlightenment-derived pattern of thought), the drive towards the (re)establishment of truth as a singular value may have a strong appeal. It might seem that if only some criteria to arbitrate between different claims and establish their truthfulness could be determined, this would lead back to a more predictable public sphere. Nevertheless, it is crucial to keep in mind that should the constellations of power organize around the dominant models of truth, any supposedly universal guiding principles may end up as symptoms of newly emergent patterns of oppression rather than solutions to the supposed malaise of truth decay (Fuller, 2023). Likewise, inasmuch as opponents of post-truth would like to self-arrogate lofty terms, such as ‘defender of truth’ (Dell’Utri, 2023, p. 165), the opposite of post-truth is not necessarily truth either. Instead, as stressed by Koekoek and Zakin (2023, p. 127) in their otherwise critical take on post-truth, ‘democratic promise lies precisely in the possibility of challenging existing orders and enacting alternative ones (even ones that might be deemed scandalous within current norms)’. Similarly, following Hannon (2023, p. 18), ‘[w]hat makes democracy valuable, in part, is that it guards against illusions of certainty’. Instead, the nostalgic accounts of post-truth are geared towards a rehashing of such illusory certainty. In fact, both structurally and semantically, they are, once again, identical to the political movements they condemn and could easily be rephrased into slogans like ‘Make truth great again’ or ‘Take back control of truth’. What lies in common is a longing for stability and closure, and the framing of alternatives not as competing options but as having taken away the cherished state of affairs and, therefore as evil, either by choice or due to some internal deficiency. In either way and for either camp, the other cannot be encountered on an equal footing.
Nevertheless, disagreement ought to be seen as fundamental to democratic politics. In particular, disagreement is more likely to pertain to the high-stakes foundational principles of the political community. As Marres (2018, pp. 439–440) observes, ‘the statements that we can or should ‘all’ be able to agree about, and about which prescriptive normativity can be securely exerted, tend to be the less crucial, conditional statements that indicate the margins of public debate’; on the contrary, ‘the claims that are at the centre of public debate, and help organize it, are often marked by epistemic dynamism’. In that sense, the establishment of a final version of truth would only deepen the entrenchment of the powers pertaining to the status quo at the exclusion of those who do not fit the established framework. Newman (2023, p. 25), for example, also argues against closure in politics and the need to challenge the status quo, borrowing from Foucault the notion of parrhesia—effectively, the practice of speaking truth to power. Such a practice is both risky and necessitating commitment: the parrhesiast ‘lacks the protection of a political constituency and […] assumes all the risks of speaking the truth as a genuine ethical position’ (Newman, 2023, p. 25). This is wielded as an alternative to post-truth: while for Newman, post-truth is always the easy option—the translation of the majority’s biases and misconceptions into public discourse—the practice of parrhesia harkens back to the singularity of truth: there is always the truth that has to be spoken (Newman, 2023, p. 25). Instead, the perspective advocated in this chapter aims to uproot parrhesia or any other conceptualization of proclaiming the truth by arguing that any act of speaking is ultimately groundless and only has value and meaning that is immanent to itself. After all, once one rejects the very premise of a Cartesian subject as the benchmark model of the political actor on both empirical and normative grounds (i.e. as both fictional and discriminatory), the very possibility of there being a universal externally grounded truth that can be objectively discovered and, therefore, anchor political discourse collapses. Crucially, though, the practice of speaking truth and investing in truth is not cancelled: instead, it points to the possibility of a multiplicity of co-present truth-speakers whose truth-utterances are equally groundless but, nevertheless, manifest equal claim to authority (it must be strongly stressed that this only applies to honest truth-speakers and not those intentionally trying to deceive). In order to better understand this practice, one needs to delve into the tragic nature of politics.
The tragic pertains to politics inasmuch as choices have to be made and defended, sometimes to the point of sacrifice, but they are made on a groundless terrain, i.e. they are always partial, embodied, and embedded but never universally anchored. For this reason, the tragic dimension of politics comprises ‘striving for something particular in the hope of deliverance’ without ever being able to fulfil that goal (Kalpokas, 2018, pp. 165–166). Under such circumstances, one finds themselves in a seemingly paradoxical situation: simultaneously in need of making fundamental choices and having no ultimate grounding for them. Fixity and taken-for-granted identities and subject positions become virtually impossible (unless one resorts back to power-laden essentialism). Instead, individuals are condemned to a ‘permanent pursuit of political selfhood, always already having decided upon a particular manifestation of the latter on the groundless terrain of human existence’ without the ability to achieve such self-realization in practical terms (Kalpokas, 2018, p. 166). Crucially, then, the ultimate nature of the tragic is only revealed by way of ‘discarding the false consolation of some higher value’ (Kalpokas, 2018, p. 167). Similarly, for Neidleman (2020, p. 464), ‘[t]ragedy begins from a particular conception of conflict (as inescapable), impossibility (as constitutive), and dissolution (as inevitable)’. Interpreted in this context, ‘divisiveness is not a negative or politically disempowering principle in the democratic imaginary’ but, instead, ‘it underlies the requisite resistance to uniformity; it animates the heterogeneity necessary to withstanding a debilitating stability […] of political agency’ (Gourgouris, 2014, p. 816). The tragic idea of politics, therefore, manages to avoid both the de-politization of disagreement, which would lower the stakes involved, and the fantasy of overcoming disagreement through some future utopia—instead, difference and conflict thus are seen as unavoidable (Neidleman, 2020, p. 464), as the necessary corollary of groundlessness once the totalizing unitary standard of humanity and truth is discarded. However, it must also be admitted that tragedy is not a universal descriptor of any conflict—instead, ‘[t]ragedy occurs when conflicting forces can be neither evaded nor transcended, neither eschewed nor reconciled’ (Neidleman, 2020, p. 465). Such tragic conflict is, naturally, impossible without there being a clash of foundational truths, without groundless and co-present truth-telling.
The crux of the tragic lies in the fact that democracy necessitates rules to be made by the citizens, but at the same time, citizens are deprived of the possibility of relying on an external authority to ground their decisions—a condition they cannot escape without doing away with democracy altogether (Neidleman, 2020, p. 472). Similarly, for Gourgouris (2014), democracy is a regime without a foundation or authorization, one that places its citizens in a condition of permanent uncertainty. Hence, democracy is ‘unsettling’ because it is ‘a political condition that requires an unconditional commitment to the continuous formation and transformation of the polis, which, in this respect, can never settle’, but, instead, undergoes a continual process of (re)imagination and (re)formation (Gourgouris, 2014, p. 817). While occasionally there might be hope of overcoming this foundational dynamic, tragedy shows that such attempts are always doomed to failure (Gourgouris, 2014). Instead, ‘the groundlessness of human existence [is] manifest in political conflict as Void-of-Order’, best conceptualized as a clash of potentialities that have no foundation beyond themselves but, nevertheless, must be taken as authoritative by their adherents (Kalpokas, 2018, p. 169). The aforementioned Void-of-Order acts as a centripetal force: as any order is ultimately groundless, it is permanently open to contestation from any of the equally groundless alternatives, not as a matter of either of them becoming the ultimate order (since nothing that is groundless can be ultimately anchored) but as a matter of holding each other in tension. However, the establishment of illusory centres of meaning and order, such as essentialist appeals to truth-and-humanity standards, can easily derail this fragile system by closing it off to competition at the expense and to the detriment of those not captured by the dominant standard.
Nevertheless, in some cases, tragedy can also be used to smuggle in the return of humanism in a new form: ‘not the rationalist, universalist variety’ but, instead, one based on shared mortality and ‘vulnerability to suffering’ (Honig, 2010, p. 1). Still, one must ask whether mortality and suffering are truly uniquely human and, likewise, whether even all humans are (and have been) equally predisposed to mortality and suffering by the conditions of their lives and inherent hierarchies of value. Of the two humanist views of tragedy presented by Honig (2010, pp. 2–3), both contain serious flaws. The first, attributable to traditional humanism, emphasizes how ‘tragedy renders clear the human spirit, exhibiting human willingness to sacrifice on behalf of a principle, commitment, or desire’, defiantly meeting death and knowing that it would be for a principle that lives on (Honig, 2010, pp. 2–3). However, such a heroic position is undermined by the groundlessness of any claim, choice, or ideal, thereby leaving death in vain. For the second type of humanism, meanwhile, what matters ‘is not the tragic protagonist’s martyrdom, but rather their vulnerability’, thereby foregrounding the focus on mortality and suffering (Honig, 2010, p. 3). This, however, is a rather exalted view that begs the question of whether there really is always meaning in death and suffering, particularly coming back to the groundless terrain of politics. Hence, instead of a quasi-masochist self-exaltation in suffering, one should rather focus on mundane suffering, suffering-in-vain at the hands of others. Suffering while defending an ideal, as well as suffering at the hands of defenders of an ideal, must be understood as equally groundless, yet necessary for there to be a meaning at all: truth-utterances may be groundless, but they are also invested in. There must certainly be an element of belief in once’s choice and course of action, or else political paralysis would ensue; however, ‘belief must be simultaneously counterbalanced with the groundlessness of tragic choice’ (Kalpokas, 2018, p. 169). The above also implies a perpetuity of political struggle—ordering instead of order (Kalpokas, 2018). This would also enable the reconceptualization of post-truth as groundless truth or, rather, a co-groundlessness of truth-utterances that nevertheless have to be played out against each other in a tragic struggle. Crucially, therefore, ‘[t]ruth is always the name of an exalted contingency’, thereby necessitating a reframing of politics as competition among partial interpretations that can never be brought together in a synthesis or in a singular order to be fought for and established (Kalpokas, 2018, p. 169). The challenge, therefore, is in learning to embrace the tragic without the heroic.
Similarly, for Koekoek and Zakin (2023, p. 130), ‘the need for sharing a world and contesting pre-given forms of life’ is ‘foundational to democratic politics’, with a clear implication that ‘overcoming or finally stabilizing [such contestation] would undermine democracy’, thereby rendering any reality-establishing criterion ‘a phantasm, forever out of reach’. For them, the key difference between democratic contestation and post-truth is that the former represents the constant (but ultimately futile) striving for commonality, whereas the latter undermines the very conditions for any commonality. Nevertheless, the assumption of groundlessness of political existence precludes the very possibility of commonality across groups, thus implying that there is nothing to undermine in the first place. Post-truth, therefore, should be seen as a diagnosis rather than some kind of disease. Also, for Hoggan-Kloubert and Hoggan (2023, p. 17), as part of a solution to the political challenges of today, ‘we need to develop and pursue common, shared public (learning) spaces as platforms for encounter and dialogue across differences’. Nevertheless, such assertions only further imply that there is some common ground to be covered, and that there exist abstract individuals devoid of particularistic subject positions—a typical standpoint of Enlightenment lineage. Even if we reframe objectivity as a practical task, as something that arises from dealings, practices, and behaviours among subjects (Dell’Utri, 2023, p. 173), no consideration is typically given of the conditions under which such practices take shape and the unavoidably partial, power-laden nature of any standard taken as objective. Instead, focus should be directed towards the abovementioned dealings, practices, and behaviours without attempting to put them together into something more. Rather, it is interactivity that should matter as a practice that keeps the diverse (and unavoidably partial) subject positions together. Crucially, by simply denoting the situatedness of entities (human individuals included), interactivity does not preclude or undermine the high stakes of tragic politics.
Still, as a final observation, a vital clarification has to be made. While the framework above is open to any honest truth-utterances, there, in fact, is a normative ground to discard some honest truth-utterances: truth-utterances which essentialize others, particularly in value-diminishing ways, should also be disallowed. After all, essentializing utterances obstruct the groundlessness and interactivity of the political domain by aiming to fix others in predefined positions and/or push them below the plain of interaction. However, as long as this playing field is upheld, openness to truth-utterances must be seen as the necessary condition for the unavoidably tragic dynamic of groundless democratic politics.
Conclusion
While the mainstream representations of post-truth tend to presuppose nostalgia for better times supposedly lost, this chapter has argued that this interpretation is not only futile but also cannot be fully reconciled with democratic politics. Instead, such accounts tend to be nostalgic for something that has been fictional all along—the rational disembodied Cartesian subject, supposedly capable of uncovering objective truth through the employment of superior reason. In important ways, such discourse also echoes that which it purports to criticize, namely, populist reasoning. As an alternative, politics has been reframed here as a tragic domain, characterized by a plurality of truth-utterances that are expressed, held, and defended, but ultimately without the salvation of standing for undisputable truth. In this way, tragic politics is anti-heroic: there is no transcendental ideal to merit sacrifice but, instead, incessant interactive engagement on a groundless terrain, whereby ordering must always take place, yet without the consolation of arriving at a fixed point of order. Simultaneously, then, post-truth is better understood in a diagnostic, rather than evaluative, sense.
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Kalpokas, I., Bureiko, A. (2024). Nostalgic Post-truth: Towards an Anti-humanist Theory of Communication. In: Newman, S., Conrad, M. (eds) Post-Truth Populism. Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-64178-7_3
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