Abstract
Recent discourses of post-truth and fake news indicate that something has happened in terms of how (neoliberal) reality is perceived. But how can we theoretically conceptualize this phenomenon, embodied in the recent rise of alt-right movements, which came full circle with the election of Donald Trump and the re-emergence of chauvinistic discourses in Europe? Is post-truth a problem reserved exclusively for the sphere of politics or does it resonate as something still more far-reaching?
Even though this text will claim that discourse on post-truth ought not be conceptualized as a radical break in terms of its ontology and epistemology from the Western episteme, it is still interesting just how recently the notion of post-truth has emerged as a phenomenon associated with the rise of populist alt-right political movements. Regarding the phenomenon of fake news, contrary to common mass media perception, we claim that the term fake news is in itself flawed, as it more or less designates a crisis of the dominant journalistic paradigm, coupled with economic models of mass media corporations. Therefore, to address it directly we will conceptualize its epistemic conditions, engendered in particular media technologies and its economic and social organization, concluding by providing a case study of the so-called conspiracy theories as a form of a specific regime of truth called post-truth.
Still, this text will argue that the phenomenon of post-truth is not exclusively tied to political discourses. In fact, current political discourses are just a small (albeit important) part of the new aestheticized regime, distinctive for its specific technological mediation, manifested in the singular correlation between organization of the human sense of perception and historical circumstances, indicating a unique socio-political conjuncture.
In this vein, this text is arguing that post-truth should be regarded as a phenomenon that cannot be properly understood without taking into account this new aestheticized regime, distinctive for its contemporary mode of technologized mediation, its specific historical circumstances of optimized neoliberal governmentality and, finally, its epistemic conditions tied to the Western epistemic matrix, which will firstly be thematized by addressing the problem of mediation through two major theoretical perspectives on communication, i.e. Stuart Hall’s cultural and C. E. Shannon’s mathematical model of communication, and secondly, through the work of François Laruelle and Jonathan Beller as both question the Western epistemic matrix by intertwining the digital with the metaphysical.
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Notes
- 1.
By emphasizing Trump, we are not so much interested in him as a concrete political representative, but more as a symptom of the so-called reset neoliberalism and, what is more, of a clear cut to American version of liberal “good” empire, which, as Mimi Thi Nguyen in her book The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages argues, has otherwise been associated with a paradox situation, where on one hand, the empire avows to reverence aliveness and beauty, whereas on the other hand it produces specific subjects, indefinitely indebted to the empire, that prior to receiving the gift of freedom, experienced violence and war (Thi Nguyen 2012). However, if the gift of freedom is, following Mimi Thi Nguyen, frisson of freedom and violence, obscuring American liberalism’s innovations of the empire, with Trump there is no obstruction anymore. Trump is just a signifier for the ascendance of the new aestheticized digital regime.
- 2.
Just a short objection. There is no simple identity between Meillassoux’s mathematics of the absolute and the logic of computation. Computation is based on probability, while the absolute is immeasurable; it is transfinite, to use a term from mathematics, and it is contingent. Meillassoux bases his argument on the difference between chance and contingency on one hand and potentiality and virtuality on the other. Potentiality arises from a multitude of options, which may or may not be actualized; this is the ontological basis of probabilistic calculation, which calculates their possible or impossible actualizations. By contrast, virtuality flows literally from scratch; it does not concern the possible or impossible actualization of a certain potentiality, but the emergence of discontinuity, which was not included as a potential. As Meillassoux put it: “the present is never pregnant with the future” (Meillassoux 2011, p. 232).
- 3.
In other words, as part of the real, philosophy in the last instance is non-philosophy—for this reason, in the last instance the real determines philosophy as well as any other thought. We cannot go into the details here, therefore we can only take a short glimpse at Laruelle’s Marxist inspired concept in the last instance as the concept of how to think relation without relation, meaning an unilateral and irreversible relation, a relation as a clone. It is feasible to present the matter in a following scheme. The philosophical scheme, if traditionally based on the difference between transcendental and empirical, is doubled. On the one side, there is the real, which is not and cannot be given, on the other side, there is the transcendental and empirical, which are already given; on the one side, the radical immanence of the one, on the other side, the mediation of the transcendental and the empirical, on the one side the one, and on the other side, the difference. In other words, on the one side, we are faced with the radical autonomy of the real and on the other side, we are dealing with relative autonomy of transcendental and empirical because transcendental and empirical are always determined by the radically autonomous one.
- 4.
On the contrary, Laruelle’s thought is not about the world, which presupposes a transcended reflection of the world, but it is instead parallel to the world. To say in more practical, wordly form, it is not a commentary on the world and its transcendental-empirical affairs, but a method, how to think without a commentary, without a presuppositions, which is possible only in the last instance, based on the already given transcendental-empirical material.
- 5.
Laruelle’s non-Western thinking mode is still deeply Western—of course, it is immanent to it. Though, there exists an old and even more non-correlationist type of practice than photography, it is sound, or to put it with Wolfgang Ernst (2016), sonicity, where sonic is articulated as the real qua the real.
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Cvar, N., Bobnič, R. (2019). Truth, Post-truth, Non-truth: New Aestheticized Digital Regime of Truth. In: Overell, R., Nicholls, B. (eds) Post-Truth and the Mediation of Reality. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25670-8_5
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