Post-Truth And The Mediation Of Reality: New Conjunctures 3030256693, 9783030256692, 9783030256708

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements......Page 5
About This Book......Page 6
Contents......Page 8
Notes on Contributors......Page 10
List of Figures......Page 13
1 Introduction: Post-truth and the Mediation of Reality......Page 14
A Conjunctural Analysis......Page 15
Reality in Crisis?......Page 17
Organisation of ‘Post-truth’ and the Mediation of Reality: New Conjunctures......Page 21
References......Page 24
Part I Location......Page 26
2 Fake President: Telemorphosis and the Performance of Grotesque Power......Page 27
Theorizing The Trump Show......Page 30
Registers of Critique......Page 36
Observation/Detection......Page 37
Spectacularization/Savviness......Page 41
Resonance/Affect......Page 44
Conclusion......Page 46
References......Page 47
The Curious Object of Love......Page 50
“I Prefer to Remain the in Shadows”......Page 54
Love Is the Only “Best Offer”......Page 57
The Elusive Object of Love......Page 59
Listening for Desire......Page 65
References......Page 66
Introduction......Page 67
The Phantom Menace......Page 69
Peterson’s Thought......Page 74
The Phantom Takes a Form: Baudrillard......Page 78
Conclusion......Page 84
References......Page 85
Introduction......Page 88
Cracks of (Neoliberal) Reality and the Ascendency of the New Aestheticized Digital Regime......Page 89
Short Taxonomy of the Theories of Mediation or Epistemic Conditions of Post-truth and the Ascendance of Digital Regime of Truth......Page 92
Cultural-Mathematic Complex of Mediation......Page 94
The Mathematics of Liberalism......Page 97
Rigorous Science of Truth: Laruelle’s Theory of Non-philosophy......Page 99
Conspiracy, a General Form of Post-truth? (A Case Study)......Page 105
Final Remarks: Post-truth, Fascism, Neoliberalism and Digital Flâneur......Page 107
References......Page 111
Part II Crisis......Page 113
Introduction......Page 114
Conjunctural Contexts......Page 117
Cultural Studies and Gramsci......Page 120
Cultural Studies and Althusser......Page 122
Relating the Real in Popular Culture......Page 125
The (K)Not Real......Page 128
References......Page 134
7 Veils of Prejudice: Race and Class in the Current Conjuncture......Page 138
The Paradoxes of Race and Racism......Page 141
Conjunctural Analysis......Page 143
Legible Fractures in Race Scholarship......Page 146
Racial Capitalism......Page 148
Denial of Rights and of Life......Page 151
Concluding Remarks......Page 154
References......Page 155
Part III Symptom......Page 158
Truth and Post-truth......Page 159
The Prehistory of the Museum......Page 161
Jacques Lacan and the Subject in Society......Page 167
The Return of the (Temporarily) Repressed: The Contemporary Kammern......Page 171
The Museum, the Subject and Truth......Page 174
References......Page 179
9 Civility, Subversion and Technocratic Class Consciousness: Reconstituting Truth in the Journalistic Field......Page 182
The Field, Truth and Heteronomy......Page 184
The Field, Trump and the Political......Page 188
Fake News and Technocratic Class Consciousness......Page 194
Conclusion......Page 201
References......Page 203
Index......Page 208

Citation preview

Post-Truth and the Mediation of Reality New Conjunctures Edited by

rose m a ry ov e r e l l br e t t n ic hol l s

Post-Truth and the Mediation of Reality

Rosemary Overell · Brett Nicholls Editors

Post-Truth and the Mediation of Reality New Conjunctures

Editors Rosemary Overell University of Otago Otago, New Zealand

Brett Nicholls University of Otago Otago, New Zealand

ISBN 978-3-030-25669-2 ISBN 978-3-030-25670-8  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25670-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover design by estudioCalamar This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the contributors to this volume for their work. We would also like to thank the Performance of the Real research theme, who funded the conference that led to this volume; the Media, Film and Communication programme at the University of Otago for their support; the Mediating the Real conference attendees; participants at our postgraduate reading groups without whose lively discussion this volume would not have been possible; the peer reviewers for each chapter; and the patient editors at Palgrave Macmillan. We also acknowledge and thank for their kind support Monica Vonesch, Maureen Lloyd, and Paulette Milnes, and, for their intellectual generosity, Cindy Zeiher, Laurie Ouellette, Esther Faye, John Farnsworth, Paul Kirkham, Kevin Fletcher, Peter Barton, Simon Ryan, Kevin Fisher, and Lisa Radford.

v

About This Book

Our contemporary moment is fixated on arbitrating and articulating ‘reality’. With the spectre of buzzwords like ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ we find a scramble to locate or fix some sort of universal, immovable ‘real’ beneath what are positioned as ‘fake’ articulations and discourse. In this context, it seems as though modern rationality has been dangerously discarded and replaced by a strange form of powerful irrationality, in which it is difficult to distinguish the illusory from the real. Often the arbitration of reality is placed in the hands of the media as well as academics. To be literate and savvy is to be able to ascertain the real from the fake. Nonetheless, media and, again, academia (particularly through the so-called ‘postmodern turn’), are simultaneously blamed as producing the apparent crisis of realness. To engage with this crisis, this collection proposes the need for a new conjuncture in communication and cultural studies of media. Building on Hall’s understanding of ‘conjuncture’ (1978; 1988; 2010) as a way of grasping moments within hegemonic struggle we suggest that—with the ascent of social media as a key site for the enactment of increasingly embodied politics—the current moment requires a revitalization of the concept of conjuncture. In particular, this collection confronts questions of how to grapple with mediated politics (Twitter; Facebook; Television, etc.) in what has been dubbed a ‘post-truth’ era. Post-Truth and the Mediation of Reality grapples with a conjunctural approach through a broad-fronted engagement with multiple sites of mediations of reality. It considers constructions of reality in terms of vii

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discursive representation in popular media, but also how realness (that thing we seemed to have misplaced in the context of ‘post-truth’) works as a site for an affective fantasy for bearable, cognisant spaces and sites in which the election of Trump, the encroaching disaster of climate change, the ongoing revelations around #NotAllMen, and other sites in which it becomes an issue. It is divided into three parts: ‘Location’; ‘Crisis’; and ‘Symptom’.

Contents

1 Introduction: Post-truth and the Mediation of Reality 1 Rosemary Overell and Brett Nicholls Part I  Location 2 Fake President: Telemorphosis and the Performance of Grotesque Power 15 Laurie Ouellette 3 White Noise of Desire 39 Cindy Zeiher 4 Postmodernism in the Twenty-First Century: Jordan Peterson, Jean Baudrillard and the Problem of Chaos 57 Brett Nicholls 5 Truth, Post-truth, Non-truth: New Aestheticized Digital Regime of Truth 79 Nina Cvar and Robert Bobnič

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CONTENTS

Part II  Crisis 6 The Reveal of the Real: Fact-Checking and ‘Not-Tags’ in the Current Conjuncture 107 Rosemary Overell 7 Veils of Prejudice: Race and Class in the Current Conjuncture 131 R. Harindranath Part III  Symptom 8 Pre-truth, Post-truth and the Present: Jacques Lacan and the Real Horror of Contemporary Knowledge 153 Scott Wilson 9 Civility, Subversion and Technocratic Class Consciousness: Reconstituting Truth in the Journalistic Field 177 Olivier Jutel Index 203

Notes

on

Contributors

Robert Bobnič  is a Ph.D. student of Media Studies at Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana. His primary theoretical interests include the relation between mediation, technology, and power through the lens of contemporary realistic and materialistic philosophy. Besides his theoretical work, he had also worked as an Editor-in-Chief of legendary Slovenian student newspaper called Tribuna and Editor of Culture and Humanities Programme on Radio Študent, the oldest independent radio station in Europe. Currently is a member of the editorial board of ŠUM, Journal for contemporary art criticism and theory. He regularly writes for different theoretical journals, especially Družboslovne razprave (Social Sciences Discussion). Nina Cvar, B.A.  in Cultural Studies from University of Ljubljana, holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. She did her thesis ‘Status of Digital Image in Global Capitalism’ under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Marina Gržinić. She has presented her work at several international conferences, including ZKM Karlsruhe, Kingston University London CRMEP, ICI Berlin, Department of Philosophy of the University of Malta, ZRC SAZU, etc. As a self-employed film critic (2014–2017), she held numerous public lectures on film theory and led workshops on film criticism. She was also a member of the editorial board of the cinema magazine »KINO!«. Currently a researcher at Faculty of Media, Ljubljana.

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R. Harindranath  is Professor of Media at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. His major publications include Approaches to Audiences (1998), The ‘Crash’ Controversy (2001), Perspectives on Global Cultures (2006), Re-imagining Diaspora (2007), Audience-Citizens (2009), and Studying Digital Media Audiences (2017). He is currently completing a manuscript entitled Southern Discomfort, which re-assesses the concept and politics of the Global South. He is one of the editors of the journal Postcolonial Studies. Olivier Jutel is a lecturer at the University of Otago, Media, Film and Communication department in New Zealand. A former journalist and media worker his research has been concerned with the political logics of affective media. His published work has considered the role of Fox News and online publics in the rise of far-right populism, the libidinal investments of American liberalism and the paranoid worldview of cyber-libertarian politics. His current research is concerned with information imperialism and the roll-out of blockchain technologies in the development sector. Jutel’s political essays can be read at literary journals Overland and Springerin. Brett Nicholls is Head of Media, Film and Communication at the University of Otago in Aotearoa New Zealand. His work focusses on media culture and politics, technology, and critical theory (broadly conceived). His work appears in Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, Communication, Culture & Critique, and Critical Horizons, among others. He recently published an extensive account of the documentary films of Adam Curtis in Borderlands. Laurie Ouellette is Professor of Communication Studies and Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. She has written extensively about reality television for journals such as Television & New Media, Continuum and European Journal of Cultural Studies. She is co-author of Better Living Through Reality Television: Television and Post-Welfare Citizenship, author of Lifestyle TV, and co-editor of Keywords for Media Studies, among other books. Rosemary Overell is a lecturer at the University of Otago, New Zealand. She considers how gendered subjectivities are co-constituted by and through mediation, drawing particularly on Lacanian psychoanalysis to explore a variety of mediated sites. In particular, she considers the intersections between affect and signification and how these produce

Notes on Contributors  

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gender. She is the author Affective Intensities in Extreme Music Scenes (Palgrave, 2014) and editor of Orienting Feminisms (with Catherine Dale, Palgrave 2018). Rosemary is also a regular contributor to un magazine. Scott Wilson is a Senior Advisor Research and Innovation with Whitireia and WelTec Community Colleges, New Zealand. He was the 2013 Fulbright Visiting New Zealand Scholar at Georgetown University, and is the author of The Politics of Insects: David Cronenberg’s Cinema of Confrontation (2011). He has recently edited a volume on extreme and unpopular music, Music at the Extremes: Essays on Sounds Outside the Mainstream (2015) and is the Series Editor of The Bloomsbury Companions to Contemporary Filmmakers. Cindy Zeiher is a lecturer in the School of Language, Social and Political Sciences at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. Her writings and publications are in the areas of Lacanian psychoanalysis, subjectivities, politics, science and social theories. Together with Todd McGowan she has edited and contributed to a collection of essays, Can Philosophy Love? Reflections and Encounters (2017, Rowman and Littlefield International) and has coauthored On Silence: Holding the Voice Hostage (2019, Lacan Palgrave Series) with Ed Pluth. She is also currently editing a collection of essays, Psychoanalytic Reflections on Stupidity and Stupor. She is co-editor and founder of the ­journal,  CT&T: Continental Thought and Theory.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4 Fig. 3.5 Fig. 3.6 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2

Doctored executive orders meme 18 Doctored CNN screenshot of Trump’s hair 27 Front cover of the New York Post 30 Virgil and Claire 40 Virgil and Claire in an embrace 41 The automaton 41 Virgil donning leather gloves 47 Claire behind the mansion walls 49 Virgil surrounded by clocks 51 Lacan’s Borromean knot 122 Posts on the #NotMyPresident Facebook page 126

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Post-truth and the Mediation of Reality Rosemary Overell and Brett Nicholls

Our contemporary moment is fixated on arbitrating and articulating ‘reality’. With the spectre of buzzwords like ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ we find a scramble to locate or fix some sort of universal, immovable ‘real’ beneath what are positioned as ‘fake’ articulations and discourse. In this context, it seems as though modern rationality has been dangerously discarded and replaced by a strange form of powerful irrationality, in which it is difficult to distinguish the illusory from the real. Often the arbitration of reality is placed in the hands of the media as well as academics. To be literate and savvy is to be able to ascertain the real from the fake. Nonetheless, media and, again, academia (particularly through the so-called ‘postmodern turn’), are blamed as producing the apparent crisis of realness.

R. Overell (B) · B. Nicholls University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] B. Nicholls e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2019 R. Overell and B. Nicholls (eds.), Post-Truth and the Mediation of Reality, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25670-8_1

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To engage with this crisis, ‘Post-truth’ and the Mediation of Reality: New Conjunctures proposes the need for a new conjuncture in communication and cultural studies of media. Building on Stuart Hall’s understanding of ‘conjuncture’ (1978, 1988, 2010) as a way of grasping moments within hegemonic struggle we suggest that—with the ascent of social media as a key site for the enactment of increasingly embodied politics—the current moment requires a revitalisation of the concept of conjuncture. In particular, this collection confronts questions of how to grapple with mediated politics (Twitter; Facebook; television etc.) in what has been dubbed a ‘post-truth’ era.

A Conjunctural Analysis In 1978 Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke, and Roberts wrote Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. They were among the first Anglophone thinkers to apply critical Marxism—particularly drawn from Gramsci and Althusser—to the nascent field of popular media and cultural studies. For Hall and his co-authors, addressing the ‘crisis’ of mugging required a socially and historically located analysis. They dubbed this— drawing from Gramsci (2011 [1926–1937])—a ‘conjunctural’ analysis. Though mugging was their chosen focus they were—unlike social deviancy studies practitioners, social workers or media pundits—less concerned with designating the parameters of who a mugger was, or why they mugged than with what the preoccupation with mugging might index in broader cultural history. Importantly, Hall et al. emphasise that their approach is not one of claiming that media representations of muggers (or anything for that matter) are ‘false’ or ‘untrue’. Their purpose was not the location of the ‘real story’ so that discussion could be closed down. They, indeed, note that there was a crisis. However, through their use of Gramsci they avoid the pitfalls of moral panic so often associated with crisis points. Rather, they take mugging as an ‘ideological conductor’ which both indexes, and abstracts from, the contradictory structures from which it arises. This approach sees flashpoints—and particularly their cultural representations—as sites of hegemonic struggle. Gramscian analysis, indeed, is now standard in media and communication studies (Briziarelli and Guillem 2016; Wayne 2003). Hall et al., however, were the first to ask how crisis plays out and how it is represented in terms of producing particular ‘common sense’ (ideological) assumptions—in the 1978 case, about who was mugging and why. They ranged across the field of media accounts of the

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crisis to unpack that, in fact, it was not as straightforward as the media producing a fanciful account to indoctrinate an asinine population. Rather, the crisis was figured as a point that has the potential to shift hegemonic power in multiple ways. Crises can, write Hall et al., sharpen antagonisms as well as mitigate these antagonisms and fold them back into conventional wisdom. After Policing the Crisis, Hall’s trajectory and the application of so-called ‘Continental’ theory to popular culture is well-tread ground (Chen and Morley 1996; Hall 2017). Importantly, though, he continued this conjunctural approach in the early 1980s as a response to Thatcherism and the economic crisis (Hall and Jacques 1983). As early as 1966, Hall demonstrated the influence of Gramsci, but also of Althusser (2014 [1970]) (and, of course, Raymond Williams), noting that ‘political consciousness is closely linked with the sense which a society makes of its own life, actions, experiences, history: with social consciousness, and with the dominant structure of feeling and attitude which prevails at any particular time’ (1966). Later, and coming on the heels of his ‘Defence of Theory’ paper (1981), Hall troubles Williams’ (1978) ‘structures of feeling’ premise with Althusser’s anti-humanist Marxism to consider how ‘sense-making’ through one’s lived experience works via interpellation. Hall revisits conjuncture in Soundings in 2010 as a means of response to the 2008 financial crisis. Coming with the fall of ‘New’ Labour and growing austerity in Europe, as well as the USA, Hall proposes that a conjunctural analysis might open a way of understanding, and articulating responses to the ‘Great Financial Crisis’ (GFC). That is, pursuing a Gramscian approach, Hall regards conjunctural analysis as necessarily dynamic and malleable. Further, he follows Gramsci in understanding crisis as not necessarily short and sharp—but often of a long duration. Though certain key moments may punctuate a crisis, the durability and repeated ideological mooring of crisis in common sense (hegemonic and ideological) terms is, in part, its power. In his ongoing critique of orthodox Marxism, Hall refuses to presume that class-based critique transcends the sociocultural specificities. The contingencies which define the moment which Hall discusses in 2010 are the financialisation of the economy—perhaps a result of the ‘old’ conjuncture set in motion in the 1970s—and what he sees as a withering of discussions of class in progressive movements. Grayson and Little (2017) have written a convincing recent reflection on applying conjunctural analysis post-Corbyn’s success and, indeed, after H. Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ remark. Arguably, though class is back on the table it seems, the Tories

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and Trump, still won—and we have the concomitant ascent of chauvinism with Brexit and Trump’s Wall. With this in mind, we would suggest that Hall’s proposition that we entered a new conjuncture post-2008 (which itself relates back, of course, to earlier moments) remains applicable to the current time. For Hall, conjunctural analysis depends on an identification of the contradictions that cumulate in moments deemed as ‘crisis’ by experts (MPs, academics, senators etcetera) and in the popular media. Whether it be mugging; strikes; or the GFC—these points in history are marked by a repeated articulation of the period as a crisis. A conjunctural analysis takes a Gramscian approach to consider how this site of contradictions may shift (or maintain) hegemonic power, but also applies Althusser’s ideas to understand how the language of crisis has an interpellative function to reproduce dominant ideology. Crucial—and for this collection, I think this point cannot be overstated—is that crisis points are sites when multiple seemingly disparate conflicts merge. Hall notes in a conversation with Doreen Massey in 2010 that: The definition of a conjunctural crisis is when these ‘relatively autonomous’ sites – which have different origins, are driven by different contradictions, and develop according to their own temporalities—are nevertheless ‘convened’ or condensed in the same moment. Then there is crisis, a break, a ‘ruptural fusion.’ (pp. 59–60)

Here, Hall demonstrates Gramsci, and Althusser’s, influence. With crisis comes rupture, but also the attempts to fuse together the contradictions which irrupt from such moments into a coherent ideology. As Hall points out in his dialogue with Massey, it is crucial for cultural critics to describe the varying landscapes of crisis as a means for considering and, indeed, countering hegemonic power (p. 65). Lawrence Grossberg also takes up Hall’s ideas in Cultural Studies in the Future Tense (2010) where he discusses conjunctural analysis as illuminating the contingencies of the present and ‘explores the possibilities of changing it’ (emphasis added, p. 58). For Grossberg, we should think of moments of crisis as a ‘problem-space’ which bear consideration for media and communications critics who want to broaden cultural imaginations beyond the limited perspectives offered by dominant culture, particularly in the media.

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Reality in Crisis? Since the election of Trump and the attendant Brexit vote, the language of crisis certainly abounds in the West. Politicians, academics and media personalities have declared that America has become ‘untethered from reality’ (Anderson 2017). Bruno Tertrais contends, ‘postmodernism and French intellectuals paved the way for “post-truth” and “alt-facts”’ (2017). Highly esteemed historian, Richard J. Evans, asks: ‘If I am wrong, and postmodernist disbelief in truth didn’t lead to our post-truth age, then how do we explain the current disdain for facts?’ (2017). Celebrity astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson also weighs in, declaring—in an echo of Martin Luther King: ‘I dream of a world where the truth is what shapes people’s politics, rather than politics shaping what people think is true’ (2017). We have noted above some historical (and arguably continuing) crisis flashpoints (mugging; the GFC etcetera). However, as these recent social media takes suggest, one of the most pervasive discussions has lately circled around—if not focused on—the problem of the real. Reality is a difficult concept to pin down in the current moment as it is employed so often—but in so many different ways. In particular, considerations of the real have hinged on a designation of the not real: the fake. Screeds against ‘fake’ presidents, news and polls dominate public debate. With these designations of the ‘fake’ comes the implication— and appeal to—the real as virtuous, moral and somehow … lost—or at least misplaced—in the current moment. It is not an exaggeration to dub the discourse around perceived ‘realness’—of Presidents and otherwise— as characterised by the language of crisis. As Nicholls points out, ‘On-line expressions of rage, ridicule, and dismay are surely a form of [Freudian] repetition-compulsion’. This seeming ‘assault upon reality has engendered a sense of loss and, perhaps, trauma. […] We can thus read the Twitter storm around Trump, with its expressions of unpleasure, disbelief, and (re)assertion of the realness of reality, as a form of compulsive behaviour’ (2016, p. 9). Along with discussions and designations of the not-real in the figuration of the ‘fake’ comes a conflation of realness with truthfulness. Again the crisis discourse frames truth (as virtuous and moral) as lost or corroded. We are ‘post’ truth; but at the same time, truth is posited as a sort of salve—or even saviour—for false (or mendacious) leaders, referenda and economies. We can see this concern, and the language of crisis, in recent media takes on sport. For example in a seemingly prosaic article from the

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New Zealand Herald on the Rio Olympic Games, journalist Andrew Alderson (2016) explains ‘Why Usain Bolt also has to win the 200m’. The reason is, he maintains, ‘no current athlete transcends sport more, nor has greater responsibility to perform than Usain Bolt’. The concern here is with the problem of performance-enhancing drugs at the Olympics. Bolt represents a transparent, clean game and he serves as an antidote to the unseen, and unseemly, underside of doping that had been exposed in news reporting during the lead-up to the games. The imperative for Alderson is that Bolt must win so that doubts about the authenticity, or ‘realness’, of the men’s 200 metres final can be dispelled. Bolt, it would seem, insulates us from evil and saves us from wrestling with the uncertainty that would arise should another athlete—presumably ‘enhanced’, and thus ‘fake’—happen to win. We might say, he has to win so that nothing can happen, so that the Olympic Games remains as it should be, at one with its own principles of wholesome authenticity and ‘real’ talent. The race is thus, in effect, a kind of simulation of the sporting contest in which the order of things is left undisturbed; where everything ends up in its rightful place. And when Bolt did win the race, the sport commodity remained incorrupt and intact. In this case, reality had been secured and Bolt’s and the Olympic Games’ triumph became our triumph. This sport journalism example can be taken as a symptom of this appeal to truthfulness, albeit in an oblique sense. This is a strange notion: there is the possibility that winners can be not really real, and the race itself can be imperfect. This, of course, begs the obvious question. Can a race ever be perfect? A perfect race consists of athletes competing on equal terms. The race should be a contest in which all of the competitors have an equal chance of winning. It is the outcome of the race that should be uncertain, not the authenticity of the winner. This is the fantasy of the Olympic Games in its various forms, which, as everyone knows, is untenable. In an equal situation, all the athletes would access the same resources, such as coaching, training facilities, income, competitive opportunities and so on. This is clearly not the case. Popular sports films such as Cool Runnings (Turtletaub 1993) and Eddie the Eagle (Fletcher 2016) hammer this home. In each film, the athletes overcome their local situation. In the former, an optimistic Jamaican bobsled team overcomes Jamaica’s lack of snow and the disbelief of Jamaica’s sporting administrators. In the latter, idealistic Eddie overcomes familial and physical limitations. The Jamaican bobsledders and Eddie manage to qualify, compete and finish their respective events. And

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even though they do not win, the mere fact that they competed authentically, against the odds, is a victory in itself. The films thus sentimentalise the authenticity of the sporting contest, and serve as a backdrop to the more polished and competitive sporting commodity that takes the form of Usain Bolt. It is precisely this fascination with the truth of reality that makes any commodity genuine and any political claim formidable. At the heart of this crisis around reality stands ‘the media’. The media— particularly newspapers and programmes as well as social networking sites (SNS)—become the arbitrators, but also the purveyors, of either, and both, ‘fakeness’ and ‘realness’. This is a tricky process when the key signifier of contemporary fakeness is arguably Donald Trump. Much is made by media commentators of his ‘fake’ hair (Hamilton 2018), tan (Anderson 2017) and his apparent lack of integrity (Cilliza 2018). This is despite his incessant claims to ‘realness’—performed on his SNS accounts. Trump’s twitter and Instagram handles are ‘realDonaldTrump’ and his public profile arguably solidified in the ‘boardroom’ of reality television programme The Apprentice (Burnett 2004–2017). Trump, too, is keen to appeal to sincerity in his populist ‘plain talk’ and damning of ‘elites’ for pretentiousness. His rhetoric hinges on classifying the ‘fake’—with numerous news outlets, political attaches and even his replacement on The Apprentice (Arnold Schwarzenegger), being branded with the moniker. All this, of course, is avidly followed and commented on by the popular media, SNS pundits (the so-called ‘twitterati’) and academic experts. For both Trump, and the media (#fakenews or otherwise) this arbitration of the ‘real truth’ works ideologically. We can return, here, to Hall. As Featherstone writes, in his recent work calling for a revival of conjunctural analysis, for Hall, ideology worked ‘sotto voce’ through the presentation of bourgeois interests as a ‘reasonable, sensible’ (p. 38) expressions of facts. In Trump’s case, sotto voce may not be apt! However, the designation and appeal to real facts certainly forms a key ideological element of discourses of the ‘real’ in the current moment. It is useful at this point to return to the analysis in Policing the Crisis — forty years on, the discussion of the veracity of media representations of key figures remains a concern for experts, journalists and academics. Such mediations do not simply reflect the crisis, but actively (re)produce it, name the stakes and set the parameters of what is considered real—or not. As Hall et al. laid out in Policing the Crisis this ability to arbitrate and constitute ‘reality’ is key to the maintenance and continuation of ideology. This is why accounting for mediations of the real is so crucial for media and cultural

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studies in the present moment. In terms of a conjunctural analysis, it is imperative we unpack the ‘common-sense’ appeals to a weighty, virtuous ‘reality’ somehow outside the world of #fakenews and post-truths. This collection, however, is not concerned with dissecting the real from the fake in media representations. Rather, we ask what it means to frame the real as ‘in crisis’ in terms of its conjunctural possibilities in the face of hegemonic power. We do not claim that the back and forth about the authenticity of media coverage is new. Rather, we contend that, at this moment, the fervour with which this discourse around reality is articulated could be read as a crisis demanding a conjunctural approach. This collection grapples with a conjunctural approach through a broadfronted engagement with multiple sites of mediations of reality. It considers constructions of reality in terms of discursive representation in popular media, but also how realness (that thing we seemed to have misplaced in the context of ‘post-truth’) works as a site for an affective fantasy for bearable, cognisant spaces and sites in which the election of Trump, the encroaching disaster of climate change, the ongoing revelations around #MeToo, and other sites in which it becomes an issue.

Organisation of ‘Post-truth ’ and the Mediation of Reality: New Conjunctures This book tackles both the lay and theoretical concepts of reality in the context of contemporary media and communication sites and effects. While not preoccupied with reproducing an Anglo-American hegemony, it is undeniable that Anglophone popular media debate about realness has reached a flashpoint in global centres. This collection is by no means exhaustive, but it does tackle key sites in which realness is at issue within contemporary Anglophone media culture: Trumpism, reality TV, social media productions of the truth, fake news and post-truth, the #metoo movement, and the rise of contemporary dispensers of ‘truth bombs’ in the face of an apparent postmodern threat, such as by Canadian academic Jordan Peterson. Crucially, these key sites open up tensions between truth and falsity, authenticity and fakeness, the real and its double. Such spaces thus offer coordinates for the consolidation of power as well as present possibilities for resistance. The chapters in New Conjunctures traverse this terrain using a conjunctural approach.

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New Conjunctures is divided into three parts. In order to establish the terrain of the current conjuncture, and points of tension and potential resistance, Part I, ‘Location’, takes up the work of Jean Baudrillard, the question of the postmodern, and object-oriented ontology. Against the grain of Baudrillard’s seeming unfashionable postmodernism in the current posttruth moment, Laurie Ouellette’s chapter, ‘Fake President: Telemorphosis and the Performance of Grotesque Power’, situates Donald Trump’s presidency within the discourses of reality television. Ouellette demonstrates how the telemorphosis of social life, as manifest in Trump’s governance as reality television show, produces possibilities for resisting presidential performance. Cindy Zeiher’s ‘The white noise of desire’ considers the integration of technology into everyday life. Drawing upon Lacan to consider two key films, Giuseppe Tornatore’s The Best Offer (2013) and Frances Ford Coppola’s, The Conversation (1974), Zeiher reveals how technology has become a twenty-first-century master that shapes how and what subject’s desire. Shifting focus, Brett Nicholls’s chapter, ‘Postmodernism in the twenty-first century: Jordan Peterson, Jean Baudrillard, and the problem of chaos’, provides a retake upon the postmodern as a critical concept within the current conjuncture. Focussing on the seemingly conservative antagonism in relation to the postmodern in the popular media forays and texts of Jordan Peterson, Nicholls finds that discourses drawn up around the postmodern are paradoxical. What they present us with is an extreme conservative picture of an unstable social order in crisis, one that can best be described and resisted through Baudrillard’s later work on destiny. In contradistinction to Baudrillard and the postmodern, Nina Cvar and Robert Bobniˇc, in ‘Beyond Post-truth as Mediation: From Fascism and Neoliberalism to Fake News’, argue for a reconfiguration of media studies in terms of object-oriented ontology. The conventional interpretive model of communication posits that the problem of post-truth resides in the lack of correspondence between representation and the referent. As such, as Cvar and Bobniˇc contend, this merely mirrors the epistemological basis for the interpretive model of communication in the first place. The interpretive model is always a form of post-truth, and, as such, fails to engage with the problem at the most fundamental level. In its place, the chapter argues, Laruelle’s radical immanence provides a more apt means for thinking the problem of post-truth. Part II, ‘Crisis’, takes up a range of key ways of thinking reality and the real in the context of the sorts of crises which characterise conjuncture. Rosemary Overell’s chapter, ‘The reveal of the Real: fact-checking and

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“not-tags” in the current conjuncture’, considers the apparent crisis instigated by Trump and his ilk askance—through Lacan’s understanding of the Real. She unpacks the limitations of Althusserian informed approaches to ideology in cultural studies via the trope of the ‘reveal-of-the-real’. Such reveals, frantically doled out by fact-checking journalists and informed (or otherwise) social media scions, Overell argues, function on a binarised understanding of ideology which presumes ‘stacks of facts’ as the solution to reactionary politics. Rather, she suggests, an account for current conjuncture as one of the Real, and of negation is required. Overell anchors her provocation in a discussion of ‘not-tags’, in particular ‘#NotMyPresident’ a viral response to Trump’s election. Ramaswami Harindranath’s chapter, ‘Veils of prejudice: race and class in the current conjuncture’, draws upon Policing the Crisis to reveal how images of the subaltern precede the ‘real’ and engender stereotypes and systems of misrepresentation. Harindranath considers how this reading works in the new space of social media representations. He asks: is this a new site of empowerment, of overcoming the material conditions of marginalisation? Part III, ‘Symptom’, unpacks a range of ways of conceiving of posttruth as surface phenomenon which could, indeed, be read as an ‘ideological conductor’ in Hall’s terms. Scott Wilson’s ‘Pre-truth, Post-truth and the Present: Jacques Lacan and the Real Horror of Contemporary Knowledge’ argues that post-truth reveals the horror of the Lacanian real. Wilson reckons with how truth has been conventionally established through institutions, such as the museum and, as such, is historical, provisional and yet authoritative—in other words, it is conjunctural. The emergence of the well-organised Museum, as it evolved from the wunder to the Kunstkammer or cabinet of curiosities, reveals this provisionality and organisational power. In the current conjuncture, however, this organisational power and authority has begun to wane. Contemporary subjects are now exposed, we might say, to the truth of truth, that is there is no truth. Olivier Jutel’s ‘Civility, subversion and technocratic class consciousness: reconstituting truth in the journalistic field’, returns us to the political fallout following the election of Trump in 2016. Jutel considers how public and journalistic expression of disquiet are constructed in terms of comparisons of Trump with Putin. Putin takes the form of the potent master, while Trump is constructed as an object of ridicule: impotent. For Jutel, this comparison as resistance is ineffectual.

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This collection follows Hall’s imperative that conjunctural analysis tackle the terms and forms through which politics produces, maintains and represents social relations. New Conjunctures locates mediated sites of crisis and rupture (newscasts of ‘fake Presidents’; rousing YouTube monologues from alt-right heroes; cinematic considerations of ‘true’ objects etcetera), but we hope it also makes a critical intervention in these sites, bearing out Hall’s mandate that conjunctural analysis transforms and reworks the terrain in which it engages.

References Alderson, A. (2016). Rio Olympics 2016: Why Usain Bolt Has to Win the 200m. New Zealand Herald. Accessed 1 October 2017. Available from https://www. nzherald.co.nz/sport/news/article.cfm?c_id=4&objectid=11696957. Althusser, L. (2014 [1970]). On the Reproduction of Ideology: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (G. M. Goshgarian, Trans.). London: Verso. Anderson, K. (2017, September). How America Lost Its Mind? The Atlantic. Available from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/howamerica-lost-itsmind/534231/?utm_source=twb. Accessed 1 October 2017. Anderson, C. (2017, April 25). Everything You Need to Know About Donald Trump’s Fake Tan. The Irish Examiner. Available from https://www. irishexaminer.com/examviral/everything-you-need-to-know-about-donaldtrumps-tan-787012.html. Accessed 14 June 2018. Briziarelli, M., & Guillem, S. M. (2016). Reviving Gramsci: Crisis, Communication, and Change. New York: Routledge. Burnett, M. (2004–2017). The Apprentice (Television programme). Mark Burnett Productions. Chen, K.-S., & Morley, D. (1996). Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London: Routledge. Cilliza, C. (2018, June 13). Donald Trump’s Fake-It-Til-You-Make-It Strategy on North Korea. CNN. Available from https://edition.cnn.com/2018/06/13/ politics/donald-trump-north-korea/index.html. Accessed 14 June 2018. Evans, R. J. [@RichardEvans36]. (2017, January 24). If I Am Wrong, and Postmodernist Disbelief in Truth Didn’t Lead to Our Post-truth Age, Then How Do We Explain the Current Disdain for Facts? [Tweet]. Available from https://mobile.twitter.com/RichardEvans36/status/823828364280664065. Accessed 20 September 2017. Fletcher, D. (2016). Eddie the Eagle [Motion picture]. 20th Century Fox. Gramsci, A. (2011 [1926–1937]). Prison Notebooks (J. A. Buttigeig & A. Callari, Eds. & Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press.

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Grayson, D., & Little, B. (2017). Conjunctural Analysis and the Crisis of Ideas. Soundings, 65, 59–75. Grossberg, L. (2010). Cultural Studies in the Future Tense. Durham: Duke University Press. Hall, S. (1981). In Defence of Theory. In R. Samuel (Ed.), People’s History and Socialist Theory (pp. 378–385). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Hall, S. (1988). The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London: Verso. Hall, S. (2017). Selected Political Writings: The Great Moving Right Show and Other Essays (S. Davison, D. Featherstone, M. Rustin, & B. Schwarz, Eds.). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hall, S., & Jacques, M. (Eds.). (1983). The Politics of Thatcherism. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Hall, S., & Massey, D. (2010). Interpreting the Crisis. Soundings, 44, 57–71. Hall, S., Critcher C., Jefferson, T., Clarke J., & Roberts, B. (1978). Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order. London: Macmillan. Hamilton, R. (2018, April 5). Is Donald Trump’s Hair Real or Fake? The Daily Mail. Available at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5364183/ Is-Donald-Trumps-hair-real-fake.html. Accessed 14 June 2018. Mabey, R. (Ed.). (1966). Class and the Mass Media. In Class: A Symposium (pp. 93–114). London: Blond. Nicholls, B. (2016). Baudrillard in a ‘Post-truth’ World: Groundwork for a Critique of the Rise of Trump. MEDIANZ, 16(2), 6–30. Retrieved from https:// medianz.otago.ac.nz/medianz/article/view/206. Tertrais, B. [@BrunoTertrais]. (2017, April 3). How Postmodernism and French Intellectuals Paved the Way for “Post-truth” and “Alt-Facts” [Tweet]. Available at https://twitter.com/BrunoTertrais?lang=en. Accessed 4 April 2017. Turtletaub, J. 1993. Cool Runnings [Motion picture]. Buena Vista Pictures. Tyson, N. [@neiltyson]. (2017, January 24). I Dream of a World Where the Truth Is What Shapes People’s Politics, Rather Than Politics Shaping What People Think Is True [Tweet]. Available at https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/ 823901333703032833. Accessed 3 April 2017. Wayne, M. (2003). Marxism and Media Studies. London: Pluto Press. Williams, R. (1978). Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

PART I

Location

CHAPTER 2

Fake President: Telemorphosis and the Performance of Grotesque Power Laurie Ouellette

In April 2017, the website Extra Newsfeed reported that Donald Trump had signed a deal with the NBC television network to co-produce and star in a new reality show called The Real First Family of D.C. According to the post, which circulated fast and furiously across social media, the executive producer was none other than Mark Burnett, the man who practically invented reality TV in the United States, and worked with Trump on The Apprentice (2004–present). A banner photograph featured Trump, his wife Melania, his adult children Ivanka, Donald Jr., and Eric, and their spouses on the set of NBC’s The Today Show, while the caption predicted “huge ratings success.” According to an official White House statement quoted in the story, the President had “no doubt that this will be the greatest show in the history of television,” a “mega-hit” that fuses the “gripping family drama of HBO’s Game of Thrones with the sizzling political intrigue of the Netflix series, House of Cards.” Trump was reportedly so animated by the

L. Ouellette (B) University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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deal that he tweeted at 3 a.m.: “Wow! Big News! America’s First Family coming to you in primetime starting September! Must-see TV!” (Ishac 2017). While intended as satire, the announcement of a new reality series built around the President of the United States was plausible enough to confuse many readers. As the fact-checking website Snopes quickly pointed out, it was easy to second guess the “news” story because it played on readers’ familiarity with Trump’s television background, claiming, for example, that First Lady Melania Trump’s decision to stay in New York rather than join her husband at the White House was a “plot device” suggested by Burnett to “hook viewers with the appearance of marital tension” (“Is President Trump” 2017). Other readers (including me) did a double take because the ostensibly unreal premise of The First Family of DC seemed so uncannily … familiar. To recognize the joke was to realize that something like The Trump Show already exists. With or without the designated reality series, the Trump Presidency is a hyper-mediated performance of governance staged for screens and ratings. While the mediation of reality has preoccupied scholars for some time, the election of a reality TV president with a cable news habit and a hyperactive Twitter account has triggered anxieties about the collapse of reality and its impact on political democracy that show no sign of abating. “Having watched history unspool in a direction you never believed it would go, now you question reality, and it’s likely that you always will—because reality is more slippery than a pocketful of pudding,” warned Brooke Gladstone, co-host of the US public radio program On the Media, in her bestselling treatise The Trouble with Reality (2017, p. 1). As awareness of the mediatized, performative, spectacularized, and hyperreal nature of the Trump regime saturates the cultural imaginary, it is worth reevaluating reality television’s complex relationship to “the real,” as one way of making sense of our contemporary conjuncture. While the Trump presidency evidences the ratcheting up of the screenification of sociopolitical life, it also troubles the chimera of a pure or authentic democracy somehow distinct from pervasive late-capitalist, neoliberal logics (Fisher 2009). The unsettling osmosis of political representation and its fun-house mirror has subjected both reality television and democratic rule to an unprecedented degree of scrutiny as political analysts, journalists, comedians, and social media users alike engage and critique the US Presidency as a media production. When a senior political correspondent for the New York Times called me—a scholar of popular media and culture—to explain the similarities between reality television

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entertainment and the daily operation of the Trump White House, we shared an awkward laugh—underpinned by a shared recognition that our very different objects of analysis have become inextricably bound (Baker 2017, p. A16). As someone who has been critically tracking reality television’s symbiotic relationship to changing rationalities of governing for some time (Ouellette 2009; Ouellette and Hay 2008), The Trump Show exceeds my expectations—but it has also prompted me to ask new questions about power and resistance in a post-real mediascape. Toward that end, this essay situates The Trump Show within a “State of Telemorphosis,” Jean Baudrillard’s term for the collapse of the real in the epoch of reality television and now, social media platforms (2011). Complicating Baudrillard’s fatalism, I also put forward the possibility that staging governance as a TV show in which we are all called upon to play a part also opens up new registers and tactics for contesting Trump’s performance as a ruler. If reality TV gave shape and form to the Trump presidency, its polymorphous technologies of truth and fakery have also been mined to mock his presidential image, judge his actions and behaviors large and small, and contest his political authority. The conventions of The Trump Show are also deeply intertwined with the ongoing problematization of Trump as a telemorphized version of what Michel Foucault calls grotesque sovereignty (2004). Television satire, memes, and Twitter posts routinely depict Trump as an unqualified, ridiculous, and grotesque ruler, as exemplified by digitally shared, culturejammed images of him attempting to look authoritative while signing executive orders, with the content enhanced with the childish drawing of a misspelled “kat” shown in Fig. 2.1, that highlights his stupidity and odious nature. Putting these concepts—telemorphosis and grotesque sovereignty—into conversation, I trace Trump’s transformation from the omnipotent ruler of the TV boardroom to the ridiculous, self-aggrandizing, grotesque character of the Fake President. Unlike other critics of the “trouble with reality,” I do not propose policing the boundaries between fact and fiction, show biz and “real” politics, as a solution to The Trump Show, for such thinking and invests too heavily in the illusory “outside” of our contemporary mediascape. My aim is to emphasize countertactics within a culture of post-reality, without losing sight of the grotesque nature of power in the twenty-first century. Since I began writing this essay, Trump has been widely mocked, surveilled, ridiculed and discredited, and his approval ratings have sharply fallen. This has occurred within conditions of telemorphosis—not in spite

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Fig. 2.1 Doctored executive orders meme

of them. While this points to dynamics within our conjuncture underexplored by Baudrillard, it does not necessarily disrupt the operation of grotesque sovereignty. Whether or how resistance to the Fake President will have any bearing on the intensifying violence of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and market neoliberalism is another question altogether.

Theorizing The Trump Show Baudrillard coined the term telemorphosis in 2001 to describe the total osmosis of reality and the screen signaled by the reality television program Loft Story (2001–present), the French version of the global Big Brother franchise. In a series of essays published posthumously in English (Baudrillard 2011), he took reality television as a prescient case study for diagnosing developments in the late-capitalist mediascape that have only accelerated with the arrival of social media networked cultures (Burk 2011). In these essays, Baudrillard observed a celebration of “ordinariness” seeped in the “spectacle of banality” (2011, p. 6) as burgeoning source of theatricality in media culture—as suggested by the desire to watch real people with no discernable “merit” or talent enacting quotidian subjectivities and lives on camera (2011, pp. 24–28). With more and more ordinary people appearing on television as “representatives” of the quotidian and banal—a phenomenon Graeme Turner (2010) later called the demotic turn—and the

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implementation of mobile phone voting and other expectations of audience involvement in such programs—Baudrillard also identified shifting expectations of television and new media spectatorship have come to define the era of digital interactivity and overflow. As Baudrillard understood, telemorphosis demands total involvement on the part of spectators. To be complicit with the “artificial microcosm” of reality television is not enough; we must also immerse ourselves new forms of “spontaneous interactivity,” acting as observers, participants, and judges (2011, pp. 5–7). Anticipating critiques of free labor in networked capitalist media culture (Terranova 2000; Andrejevic 2004), Baudrillard called this immersive engagement “voluntary servitude” (2011, p. 11). The compulsory “feedback loop” he observed in nascent form has become thoroughly commodified as predicted, as media corporations capitalize on interactivity, and personas, images, confessions, comments, tweets, and likes are monetized (Hearn 2006, 2008). Finally, in his essays on reality television, Baudrillard noted that claims to reality under telemorphosis had become more experimental, with quasi-scientific protocols of testing and verification entering the play of the real and the imaginary as mechanisms of “inoculation” (2011, p. 11). This observation validated by the importance of the test, the challenge, the hidden-camera, and the social experiment in the emerging genres of reality entertainment (Murray and Ouellette 2009). Baudrillard observed these interconnected tendencies at work on Loft Story, a prescient case of television’s success in “completing a fantastic operation … on the path toward an integral telemorphosis of society.” Television has “created a global event (or better, a non-event), in which everyone has become trapped,” he warned of things to come: It has elevated the “entire society to the parody stage of an integral farce, an image feedback relentless with its own reality.” What “the most radical critical critique, the most subversive delirious imagination, what no Situationist drift could have done, television has done” (2011, p. 28). We can recognize what troubled Baudrillard about reality television in The Apprentice, the US reality series that made Trump a household name. The Apprentice debuted on NBC in 2004—four years after Burnett’s Survivor (2000–present) hit ratings gold—with the New York City real estate mogul in the starring role. Teasers for the series featured Trump traveling in helicopters and chauffeured limousines, admiring his properties, and boasting about his fame and fortune, edited to the rapid beat of the soul/funk song “For the Love of Money.” In the accompanying music video, a soundbite in which claims “I’m a dictator” is repeatedly rewound in a recurring

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loop. In the debut season, a wide range of contestants, from Harvard graduates to homespun entrepreneurs, are put to the test as they compete for a job at the Trump Corporation. Already a figure in the New York City tabloid media, Trump plays an amplified, omnipotent version of himself, with camerawork, editing, concept, and narration strategically deployed to downplay a string of bankruptcies, failures and ethical violations, and to construct Trump as a master of the business world. Trump plays the role of the king, CEO, and self-made entrepreneur wrapped into one, an owner of properties and brands who lives lavishly, barks orders, fires subordinates, and demands total allegiance from his subjects. While Trump can easily be perceived as a deeply flawed, even grotesque sovereign in this over-the-top enactment of extreme wealth, toxic masculinity and ruthless boardroom behavior, this is not the intention of the program. Producers have since acknowledged the sheer labor involved in making Trump appear likable, legitimate and admirable (Keefe 2018). He is not ridiculed by the show; rather his persona is filmed and edited to exude the extraordinary ordinariness expected from reality TV celebrities. Scenes with Trump and then girlfriend Melania in their gilt-covered, fountain and jewel-encrusted luxury apartment at Trump Tower, and interpersonal drama taking place in the Trump Tower apartments where the cast is sequestered and recorded, are woven into the mix, adding a docu-soap element to the show. While there’s no voting mechanism, TV viewers are encouraged to see themselves in an amateur cast of “types” competing for the chance to serve as Trump’s apprentice, and ordinary people are looped into the production through auditions and online participatory mechanisms. Similar to Loft Story, The Apprentice draws key elements from the Big Brother franchise, and exemplifies reality television of the early 2000s. While Baudrillard anticipated The Apprentice in his analysis of telemorphosis, he did not fully develop his most interesting and innovative observations about the shifting mediascape. His treatment of reality television often circles back to earlier, more familiar arguments, as with his claim that the artificial microcosm of Loft Story is “identical to Disneyland” (2011, p. 5). In this sense, Baudrillard placed developments like Loft Story within a succession of deterrence machines that operate to disguise the extent to which all of “reality had passed over to the other side” (Baudrillard 2011, p. 48). As he famously explained in Simulacra and Simulation, Disneyland is an “ideological blanket” that exists in order to hide that it is the “real” country, all of “real America that is Disneyland …. Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real” (Baudrillard

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1994, p. 12). “The imaginary of Disneyland is neither true nor false: it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate the fiction of the real in the opposite camp” (1994, p. 13). This is not unlike his analysis of the Watergate scandal or his subsequent analysis of the election of Hollywood actor Arnold Schwarzenegger as Governor of California, which he described as a “caricature of democracy where politics is entirely a matter of idols and fans,” but which, unmasked, would merely restore illusory belief in a “rational way of exercising power” (Baudrillard 2010, p. 12). For Baudrillard, Disneyland, political scandals, Hollywood politicians and reality TV are phenomena of the same ilk, to the extent that their function as “exceptions to the rule” conceals the pervasiveness of simulated reality, political corruption, and telemorphosis, respectively, under late capitalism. The Trump Show is ready-made for this analysis, which is why Baudrillard has gained currency in the blogosphere and the popular press as a philosopher du jour (Hanlon 2018). With his lack of political credentials, reality television pedigree, obsession with his own media image and total immersion in the mediated circuitries of cable news and Twitter, Trump clearly ups the ante as a “caricature” of democracy. If we follow Baudrillard, we can see how critique of Trump’s election as an aberrance, a crude, cartoonish, and dangerous mockery of “real” democracy—distracts us from recognizing the telemorphized conditions in which we currently live. When Trump is problematized as an abnormal or “fake” president, we are encouraged to rest assured that once he is out of office, rational government will be restored and the postreal mediascape in which Trump operates will return to “normal.” Recurring attention to Trump’s un-Presidential media habits encourage these assumptions. In a typical example, the 2017 CNN news story “Must See TV: Inside Trump’s Obsession with Cable TV” subtly mocks Trump as an unusual and unqualified political leader because he gets his primary knowledge on affairs of State from cable television talk shows and embraces a telemorphized reality at odds with the habitus, protocols, and procedures of enlightened democracy. He is reported to turn on his favorite show, Fox and Friends , first thing in the morning, and end the day watching cable news on his extra-large screen TV. Trump admits to turning to the “the shows” as his main source of information about the military, and is reported to “hate watch” those television programs that aren’t complimentary of him. Trump is obliquely cast as a stand-in for a particular brand of ordinary person (the stereotypical Fox News viewer, the Trump supporter) similarly immersed in a simulation of politics. By accentuating Trump and,

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by extension, his supporters as addicted to tawdry and distorted mediations of reality, the story affirms the existence of enlightened leadership and hints at the possibility of good media (perhaps CNN) elsewhere. As a deterrence machine, The Trump Show allows CNN and other commentators to assure us that the problem of our contemporary conjuncture is contained—that reality (and rational governance) continue to exist outside the spectacle of the 45th Presidency. While it easy to see affinities between The Trump Show and Disneyland, Baudrillard’s more provisional remarks on banality, experimentation, and viewer involvement in reality television are arguably more interesting and more useful for making sense of complexities and potential contradictions of the present. In his commentaries on reality television, Baudrillard gestures toward a conception of telemorphosis that is dynamic rather than static and fixed, which opens up the possibility of contingency, movement and possibly even struggle within the total osmosis of reality and screens. To understand telemorphosis as a dynamic and potentially unpredictable set of conditions is to allow for the inevitability of resistive strategies, tactics, and counter-discourses within a post-real mediascape. Rather than looking for an “authentic” reality outside The Trump Show or surrendering to the fatalism of this impossibility, we need an understanding of what critique looks like, and how it operates, within a State of Telemorphosis. I’ll come back these ideas in the final section of the essay. First, I want to put Baudrillard’s insights on media culture into conversation with another concept that seems particularly useful for making sense of the Trump regime: grotesque sovereignty. Michel Foucault introduced the “grotesque” as a category of political analysis in his 1975 Lectures at the College of France, which were posthumously published as Abnormal (2004). Foucault was not interested in the acceleration of mediated images or screens, but in how modern forms of power came to operate, in different conjunctures, through techniques of normalization. His archival work on the use of psychiatric discourse in the penal system led him to realize that a “technology of truth” can be parodied and discredited, and still be impactful. That is to say, mockery and trivialization do not necessarily diminish the power of truth claims over individuals, bodies, and populations. Extending his thinking to the operation of power more broadly, Foucault made an analogy between the “doubling of discourse” in his archival research and the figure of the grotesque sovereign—rulers such as the Roman Emperor Nero or Mussolini, who are widely discredited as ridiculous, odious, despicable, comedic and abnormal.

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For Foucault, such “irregular, monstrous, and unstable” forms of conduct do not constitute an outside of the norm, but rather a “doubling” or “splitting of the element on the same scene” that is characteristic of the grotesque (Codebó 2015). For Foucault, to disqualify a particular ruler as foolish, incompetent, monstrous, or grotesque does not necessarily disrupt power, which he understands as multifaceted and dispersed—an “organism that can exceed the control of individuals or groups.” In this sense, grotesque power operates through the “faceless mechanics of the state, in the anonymous bureaucracies of asylums, hospitals, and prisons” (Edwards and Graulund 2013, p. 27) as well as through forms of sovereignty. As Justin Edwards and Rune Graulund point out, however, grotesque power is most visible when it operates through the embodiment of grotesque sovereignty by a dictator or discredited ruler (2013, p. 28). The grotesque element of power is more easily detected in the “personalized image of the strong man” because it is in “renegade and ‘arbitrary’ sovereignty operating outside the standard laws of reason that we can most readily discern a grotesque form of power” (Edwards and Graulund 2013, p. 28). For Foucault, the grotesque element of power operates in a particularly tricky way, through the “maximization of the effects of power on the basis of the disqualification of the one who produces them” (2004, p. 12). As an example, he points to the “grotesque character” of Mussolini, a ruler who was “absolutely inherent to the mechanism of power,” but who also provided power with “an image in which power derived from someone who was theatrically got up and depicted as a clown or buffoon” (Foucault 2004, p. 14; quoted in Edwards and Graulund 2013, p. 28). Writing around the time of the Nixon/Watergate scandal (though he does not mention these political events in his lectures), Foucault concluded that grotesque power is not stopped in its tracks, but is rather magnified and even extended by the constitution of an individual ruler as monstrous, comical or—in the case of Trump—unreal or fake. Characteristic with his prior writings on power (1977, 1988) Foucault cautioned against a bifurcation of the grotesque elements of power embodied by “over-the-top” grotesque sovereigns, and the bureaucratic institutions and technologies of grotesque power in modern societies. This warning against assuming that grotesque power rests in a single individual, rather than being saturated throughout modern capitalist societies, complements Baudrillard’s concern about deterrence machines. While Foucault said little about technologies of sign systems nor did he diagnose the place of media culture in grotesque sovereignty, there are

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some potential takeaways from his brief writings on grotesque sovereignty that can help us make sense of The Trump Show. The first is that, similar to the “doubling” of expert discourse of the penal system noted by Foucault, reality television can be routinely discredited as ridiculous, shallow, debased, and a looming threat to civilized democracy—hence grotesque— and still be powerful and indeed constitutive of a State of Telemorphosis. More directly, there is the figure of Trump himself, who we can recognize as a fully telemorphized version of Foucault’s grotesque sovereign. Similar to the grotesque rulers discussed by Foucault, Trump has become an object of disqualification and ridicule, a ruler who is widely discredited as fraudulent, incompetent, abnormal, and monstrous. What is new, is that Trump is simultaneously a multi-mediated cultural performance of grotesque sovereignty constituted through, and simultaneously mocked and discredited by, contemporary media culture. As the political theorist Thomas Dumm explains, Trump signals the “recrudescence of the grotesque in his grandiose expressions of the superlative character of everything he does, his extreme self-pity, his vulgarity, his sprayed-on suntan, his hair, his exaggerated claims and braggadocio about that history” (2017, n.p.; see also Dumm 2018). But like Trump himself, this image of grotesque sovereignty is ultimately a media production, an increasingly unlikable and unscrupulous character on The Trump Show. Just as insisting upon the authentic beneath the hyperreal has its limits for Baudrillard, Foucault shows us that classifying Trump as “abnormal” and grotesque may not impede his executive power: “Taking the grotesque as a category of political analysis to analyze Foucault’s theory of the mechanics of power does not only shed light on the inevitability of power, but also on its twofaced, Janus like, components” (Codebó 2015, n.p.). It actually bolsters the grotesque power of capitalist, neoliberal governmentality. Dumm (2017) raises the highly plausible possibility that the public is not deterred or deceived by Trump’s multi-mediated performance of sovereignty as much as we’re caught in a trap in which exposing the dissonance between the post-real representation of grotesque power and its operation has no material impact. From this perspective, the issue is not our entrapment in the telemorphosis of democratic politics. The issue is how our late-capitalist, neoliberal mediascape amplifies and discredits grotesque sovereignty in a symbiotic process that may, in the end, have no real impact on the xenophobia, racism, misogyny, and rollback of education, health care and other social programs carried out in Trump’s name.

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Registers of Critique With these conceptual frameworks in mind, the remainder of this essay circles back to the nature of grotesque sovereignty in a State of Telemorphosis. Here, I want to specifically address how technologies of truth and fakery commonly associated with reality television have been put to work to mock, ridicule and discredit Trump’s performance as President. I do not suggest that these counter-tactics overcome the State of Telemorphosisor the dynamics of grotesque sovereignty, because they are inseparable from and operate within these systems. What I do want to note is that Trump’s grotesque nature is often registered through the conventions, techniques, and dispositions associated with an already degraded and “slippery” cultural form—reality television. By attending to this tendency, we can think more complexly about the spaces and possibilities of critique in a postreal media environment. In what follows, I map out three registers where reality television and its vexed relationship to the real have been appropriated, parodied and engaged to discredit Trump and question his authority. These registers, which can overlap but are useful to separate for analytical purposes, include: (1) observation and detection; (2) spectacularization and savviness; and (3) resonance and affect. Observation/Detection The first of these registers—observation and detection—speaks to a potential paradox of telemorphosis, as well as its quasi-experimental dimensions. While reality TV trades on the quasi-scripted performance, exaggeration, and outright fabrication of the “real,” as well as on narrative storytelling through strategic editing, it also promises authenticity and access to the truth in a bid to sustain the idea that “the real” somehow exists (Murray and Ouellette 2009). Reality TV essentially promises to let us have our cake and eat it too, in the sense that the pleasures of fictional entertainment are conjoined to the codes and conventions of documentary, surveillance, social science, and other authoritative apparatuses of truth. This claim to the real is accomplished via technologies such as hidden cameras, fly-onthe-wall documentary observation, and 24/7 surveillance footage, as well as through quasi-scientific tests and experiments (Fetveit 2002; Bignell 2014). In much reality television programming, so-called ordinary people are the objects of constant observation, surveillance, monitoring and

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testing in the name of the real; when celebrities (such as the Kardashians) become the subjects of reality television programs, the quasi-scientific protocols and documentary gaze may be less condescending, but function similarly to promise authentic glimpses into the “ordinary” lives of tabloid subjects. In The Trump Show, it is the political sovereign—a figure historically associated with formal news interviews, televised press conferences, and other legitimated journalistic and nonfiction media forms, becomes the focus of reality television’s techniques. This is in some sense a reversion of ascending individualism, in the sense of the pre-modern focus on the powerful (rulers, kings) that predated the constant surveillance and regulation of individuals and populations with the rise of industrial capitalism and its attendant institutions (Foucault 1977). However, our relentless observation of Trump is not about assuring the legitimacy of the throne (as with the audiences who observed eighteenth-century royalty dressing, eating and giving birth), as much as it is a means of “proving” the reality of his boorishness and incompetency. In The Trump Show, techniques of observation and detection have been mobilized and normalized to prove Trump’s idiocy, expose his ineptness and reveal the truth of the malevolence lurking behind his official screen performance. Trump makes this easy by over-performing the role of the Presidency as cameras roll, treating his government position as an extension of his role on The Apprentice. Trump’s grandiosity and obsession with his representation in the media has fueled an ongoing counter-impetus to unmask the “hidden mechanics” of The Trump Show. Numerous reports in the Hollywood trade press, as well as on Twitter, alleged that Trump hired actors to perform as Trump supporters as early as his campaign rallies. Reality TV producer Mark Burnett’s role in staging the Trump inauguration—an event that included a helicopter ride and other tropes from The Apprentice, was uncovered and widely reported by bemused journalists. Visual counterevidence was promptly produced and circulated on television and social media to debunk the White House’s exaggeration of the “huge” size of the crowd at the event. The impetus to detect the truth about Trump through vigilant observation is not limited to professional news crews, but has been widely adopted by amateurs and social media users as well. Cell phone pictures of Trump mishandling the North Korea missile crisis in full view of the wealthy crowd at his Mar-a-Lago resort circulated fast and furiously on Twitter. As the register of observation and detection has become increasingly low-tech and viral, the subjects of telemorphosis are invited to use

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technologies of truth popularized through reality television against Trump as one way of questioning his grotesque power. On The Trump Show, Trump often appears to be caught off guard by cameras he did not invite and of which he often seems unaware. The endless circulation of paparazzi-style photographs (some professional, others amateur) that claim to discredit his performance by revealing the truth of his body, eating habits, wardrobe and, especially, his hair are a telling case in point. Twitter users often doctor these photos, adding graphics to point out phoniness, such as a CNN screenshot modified with arrows to point out the untruth of Trump’s allegedly “natural” hair. In Fig. 2.2, for example, Gawker investigates to find out exactly where Trump’s hairline lies. Photographs of Trump eating fast food, appearing overweight on the golf course, and making silly faces also circulate as memes, GIFS, and digital photos. There is a special, ongoing attempt to capture the visual evidence of Trump’s unnatural hairstyle; photographs that deploy zoom technology, often enhanced with graphics (such as photoshopped circles and arrows) circulate to highlight discrepancies between appearance and reality. In this mode of observation and detection, Trump is mocked and discredited as a political ruler on the basis of his grotesque corporeality and bodily appearance. In that sense, he is disqualified on the basis of the familiar logic of the television makeover (Lewis 2008; Sender 2012).

Fig. 2.2 Doctored CNN screenshot of Trump’s hair

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The register of observation and detection also includes watching carefully for moments of presumed authenticity within The Trump Show. As the television scholar John Corner (2002) has pointed out, reality TV viewers are well aware that “reality” is stage-managed and performed for drama on television and elsewhere, that ordinary people are enlisted play themselves as stock (often stereotypical) characters, and that entertainment formulas generally outweigh documentary and experimental claims to the real. Similar awareness arguably underscores our engagement with YouTube and other social media platforms. However, this increasingly generalized knowledge of the mechanics of reality production is never totalizing. According to Corner, for example, reality television audiences are encouraged to anticipate those moments when performing subjects are caught off guard, temporarily forget about the cameras, become emotional and unglued, or go off-script. These scenes, however mediated or encouraged by producers, are assumed to provide a greater degree of access to an authentic situation or self. In The Trump Show, glimpses of the authentic Trump are circulated by major media outlets, tabloids, and social media users as further evidence of his unfitness for rule. To cite just a few examples: photographs of Trump staring at a solar eclipse without wearing the recommended safety glasses circulated widely with the caption “Fake News,” discrediting Trump’s intelligence as well as his tirades against the professional news media. Memes of babies and small children crying in Trump’s awkward presence reveal the “truth” of his character. A viral video in which Trump tossed free paper towels into a crowd of Puerto Rican hurricane survivors while boasting about his ratings and promising to “Make America Great Again” revealed the grotesqueness of Trump’s self-absorption, lack of empathy and disregard for the violence of US policies. A particularly interesting appropriation of observation and detection to critique and disqualify Trump involves reviewing prior media representations of Trump as documentary proof of his inept, monstrous and ridiculous qualities. The 2005 Access Hollywood tape that recorded Trump, unbeknownst to him, on a hot mic as he boasted about sexually harassing and assaulting women, “grabbing them by the pussy” and getting away with it because “he’s star,” is a case in point. Initially released by the Washington Post, the tape went viral on US television and social media, circulated as definitive (and presumably unmediated) evidence of the truth of Trump’s grotesque misogyny. In October 2017, a feminist activist group replayed the 2005 recording—complete with video, audio, and subtitles—on a 12-hour loop on a giant screen set up on the National Mall near the White

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House. The entire event was also live-streamed on Facebook. “We want to remind the American people who Donald Trump really is, a self-possessed, proud sexual predator,” the women’s group told CNN, which magnified the evidentiary use of the tape by covering the event extensively. The call for NBC to release hundreds of hours of un-aired footage of Trump’s presumably racist and sexist behavior on The Apprentice—on the grounds that unearthing these video recordings will prove once and for all that Trump is abhorrent and unqualified for the role of President. When Omarosa Manigault Newman, a former Apprentice contestant turned White House aide, released a series secretly recorded tapes recorded in the White House to demonstrate Trump’s true character, a similar logic was at work. And such is the paradox which began this essay: Even as reality television is known to be highly performative and fake, it is presumed to provide a representation of reality that is somehow faithful to its referent—what Baudrillard might call a first order of simulacra (1994). Spectacularization/Savviness Another register where we can see the cultural logic of reality television being adapted and minted to discredit Trump as grotesque might be called spectacularization and savviness . This register refers to a simultaneous immersion in The Trump Show as a media production, and second-level pleasure in recognizing, mocking and parodying its pleasures and conventions, which can serve as a type of coping mechanism. The New York Post’s satirical newspaper cover depicting Trump and his staff as reality TV contestants with the headline “Survivor White House Edition” is one of many examples of this tendency. As Mark Andrejevic argues (2008), this type of savvy skepticism has become endemic to spectatorship of reality television—and much popular culture in general. The ability to “seeing through” reality television as a culturally degraded, contrived spectacle can present an illusory sense of distance and control over the conditions of telemorphosis which define our current conjuncture. Satirizing the spectacle links this sense of mastery to a virtual community of like-minded skeptics, especially when this enlightened community is formed through shared media culture. When national newspapers like the New York Times review the day-to-day operations of the Trump Administration as a reality show, treating Trump and his staff as TV characters and news of the Oval Office as melodramatic plotlines, the pleasure of savviness is evidenced. As in Fig. 2.3, the central

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Fig. 2.3 Front cover of the New York Post

figure of Trump is surrounded by the faces of political allies and rivals overlaid on images and text from the reality show, Survivor. The White House becomes a game of self-interest and survival. The Washington Post has made this approach to The Trump Show into a regular installment, using the format of the TV review to satirize the extent to which the White House is being run as a reality show, simultaneously mirroring the pleasures of reality television and flattering readers who see themselves as skeptical enough to pick up on the critique. To be sure, such readings are easy to make: When the Trump regime boasts that White House cabinet picks come from “casting central,” or subjects dismissed personnel to the sort of beratement and shame that characterized firings on The Apprentice, or evokes melodrama and suspense around staff appointments, Congressional matters and even international relations, it invites a savvy response to grotesque politics as spectacle. The point to be made here is that the pleasure of seeing through the spectacle that animates this register of critique hinges on a deep familiarity with, and investment in, the codes and conventions of reality television.

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In other words, the ammunition to mock Trump as a product of reality television necessitates that one actually watches and understands its genres. Such was the case when the magazine Vanity Fair circulated a photograph of Trump having dinner with former presidential contender Mitt Romney when Romney was being considered for a role in the Trump administration. The photo depicted the two at a candlelight dinner, and commentators and social media users alike delighted in discussing how similar the scenario looked to a cliched “intimate” moment on the dating competition show The Bachelor (2002–present). This is a type of savvy skepticism that essentially allows us to have it both ways–to enjoy the spectacle of reality television while simultaneously signaling that they are not taken in its cheap pleasures and debased hyperreality. Drawing from Jodi Dean (2002), Andrejevic characterizes this response as a reflexive disposition that uses irony, sarcasm, and snark to make “some type of impression on symbolic register whose very existence is in doubt” (2008, p. 38). Reflexivity about The Trump Show circulates across media platforms (television, newspapers, blogs, radio) and permeates user-generated memes, GIFS and Tweets, from Real Housewives franchise creator Andy Cohen humorously comparing a spat between Ivanna and Melania Trump over who was the “real” First Lady to the interpersonal dramas played out on his reality television shows, to social media posts that poke fun of the Trump regime by deconstructing its plotline, aesthetics and marketing, often in significant detail. Saturday Night Live’s running parody of Trump is perhaps the bestknown example of the register of spectacularization and savviness, circulated to a mass broadcast audience. The late-night comedy program has, since his campaign days, parodied Trump as an unintelligent, boorish, unmannered and grotesque figure (played by Alec Baldwin). Since the 2016 election, these regular skits have frequently worked to expose the Trump White House as a bad media production. In addition to mocking Trump’s untruthful, incompetent and unqualified press secretaries, SNL skits humorously show how the White House is run as a reality competition, with weekly challenges and eliminations, product placements, and prizes. The President’s Show on the US cable network Comedy Central takes this further by fully appropriating the visual and aural codes of reality television, highlighting emotional drama inside the White House, and parodying Trump and Vice President Mike Pence as feminized docu-soap characters. In each episode, the two men sip diet cokes on the sofa while gossiping about the loyalties and actions of senior White House personnel. These scenes are intercut with confessionals, in which Trump and Pence

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privately ponder their feelings about the events—and speak candidly about each other. To be in on the humor of The President’s Show is to possess a very sophisticated knowledge of the aesthetic conventions of reality programs such as Real Housewives —their camera angles, precise use of music, and close-ups on facial expressions that linter just a little to long for melodramatic effect. Because reality television’s denigration as cheap, hyper-real entertainment is highly gendered, parodies that evoke its conventions to discredit Trump as grotesque tend to reinforce similar cultural hierarchies. This register navigates The Trump Show as a symptom of the post-real from a reflexive disposition that devalues feminized popular culture—even as it also revels in it. Resonance/Affect I want to conclude with the most compelling register for critiquing The Trump Show, which I am calling resonance and affect. This register refers to the increasingly broad circulation of the kind of emotional realism that underwrites reality television across “serious news” and rational political discourse, as well as to the circulation of feelings (anger, anxiety, depression, rage) about The Trump Show through media culture. Here, I’m drawing on the work of scholars like Herman Gray (2013, 2015) who calls for media studies to move beyond its political investment in realism and the politics of representation, and to think more complexly about media’s role in the mobilization of sentiments as a basis for political action. In an “economy of visibility” marked by a surplus of media representations and imagery, scholars who care about social vulnerabilities rooted in racial, gender, economic and other inequalities should worry less about questions of accuracy or ideology, and pay more attention to those moments of media culture that “attract and hold us, and conjure strong feelings of attraction, disgust, and familiarity,” Gray contends (2013, p. 254). This isn’t an entirely new argument, of course: feminist television scholars such as Ien Ang (1985) have long insisted upon the tragic structure of feeling of postmodern culture, and their attention to the emotional realism that connects audiences to melodramatic storylines and over-the-top soap opera characters has informed scholarship on reality television, from dating shows to docu-soaps. In their research on reality TV viewers, Beverly Skeggs, Nancy Thumin and Helen Wood argue that “affective-textual encounters” offer an alternative to more distanced modes of engagement that the “cognitive and rational” over affective relationships with media

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(2008, p. 17). For marginalized audiences—such as the working-class women and lower-income women of color in their study—affective engagements with reality television (gasping, laughing, sighing, crying) serve as conduits to critical judgements about the power dynamics of everyday life enacted on screen. These affective engagements do not prioritize issues of authenticity and fakery, nor do they adopt the savvy skepticism about reality television as a pleasurable but debased cultural genre, a stance that often hinges on unequal access to education and class status. What seems to be happening in our current conjuncture is that emotions, and affective modes of engagement, have seeped into mainstream media culture as a third register of response to The Trump Show. Affect circulates across the multiple paratexts (cable news, Twitter) that surround The Trump Show, often calling Trump into question on personal, emotional and moral grounds. This response is different from the savviness discussed above, in its vulnerability and socially situated, embodied resistance to grotesque power. Journalistic emotional responses to Trump’s political actions as a ruler are one case in point. A particularly well-known example is when CNN’s Van Jones teared up and referenced his family history with racism in the wake of Trump’s 2017 defense of White Nationalist protests in Charlottesville, VA. (CNN 2017); similar examples of journalists and newsmakers crying on camera in the aftermath of something Trump has done circulate in Google screenshots and YouTube videos. When TV news personalities break convention to visibly shed tears on camera in response to something Trump has done, they deploy a type of emotional realism, offering a response to grotesque sovereignty in a register that does not hinge on assumptions about an objective or unmediated reality or hail TV viewers with an ethos of savviness. Reaction shots (similar to those deployed in narrative television) are another example of this register. Photographs and screenshots of female lawmakers whose facial expressions convey their discomfort, sadness or rage have become increasingly common whenever Trump appears in official spaces of governance; these reaction shots are often live-tweeted during Trump’s State of the Union Addresses and other TV appearances and turned into memes that live on social media. Not unlike reality TV participants who make judgments about everyday life rooted in their feelings about television characters, these widely circulated reaction shots convey a moral and sometimes political critique of The Trump Show, exemplifying the role of “resonance” in a media-saturated environment prioritized by Gray.

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Viral emotional responses to Trump’s racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and misogyny are also instances where attention to resonance and affect might provide a glimpse out of the impasse we call post-reality. As Sara Ahmed argues, emotions are not essential or innate responses to reality, but they aren’t quite symbolic constructs or simulations either. Emotions work, she says, by “adhering and sticking to objects, circulating across bodies and binding people together within particular circumstances” (Ahmed 2004, p. 119). The Trump Show can be seen as a sticking point for feelings and anxieties about the grotesqueness of power that circulate within and across the State of Telemorphosis, binding women, people of color, immigrants, and other marginalized groups to an object of resistance (Trump) and to each other. For example, shortly after the release of the Access Hollywood tape in which Trump boasted about sexually assaulting women, comedian Kelly Oxford invited women to tweet their experiences with sexual harassment and assault using the common hashtag #NotOkay. Within 14 hours of her post, more than a million women had responded, posting up to 50 harrowing stories per minute. These women used their interactive relationship with screens to circulate feelings of anger, shame, fear, anxiety, and rage about sexual harassment and assault that coalesced around and stuck to a disqualified ruler, and in many respects can be seen as a precursor of the #MeToo movement. Similar campaigns have circulated networked sentiments stemming from Trump’s detainment of families and children along the US Mexico border, his anti-transgender policies, and other issues. This register of critique opens up spaces for resistance that do not hinge on hierarchies of knowledge or the fantasy of escaping telemorphosis. However, it also exemplifies Foucault’ssovereigntypoint that grotesque can—and does—continue to operate even as its operator is despised, ridiculed and discredited. After all, Trump is still in the White House.

Conclusion This brings us back to the grotesque as a modality of power that is simultaneously animated by and contested within a State of Telemorphosis. Putting Baudrillard and Foucault into conversation, I’ve suggested three registers where we can see dynamics of disqualification at work, and I have also indicated how each of these registers—observation and detection, spectacularization and savviness and resonance and affect—draw from the same

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conventions and dispositions associated with reality television. The question of what impact these registers will have on the grotesque operation of power in the twenty-first century is a hard question to answer in advance— not least because both Baudrillard and Foucault are known pessimists. What is certain is that we need to pay closer attention to the particularities and contradictions of post-reality. If neoliberal governance has become a media production, critical media studies has its work cut out.

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CHAPTER 3

White Noise of Desire Cindy Zeiher

The Curious Object of Love It can be said that love takes the form of curiosity. Jacques-Alain Miller offers an incisive description of love when he says that [l]ove in psychoanalysis is transference. The very concept of love, its question of expressions in psychoanalysis is directed by the concept and problematics of transference so that love seems to be only displacement—a case of mistaken identity… That’s why, in analysis, love is slapped with a certain inauthenticity. (1992, unpaginated)

The film being discussed, Giuseppe Tornatore’s The Best Offer is deliberate in that it considers that such curiosity is located in the subjective will for absolute and authentic difference. That is, people and the objects which fascinate them are recognised as related and relatable, but distinctive and more importantly, recognisable in this distinction. The sublime object of love helps keep the fantasylove of a whole subjectivity potentially realisable, that is, what it might mean to be a full man or a full woman. Love allows us to at least imagine the portrayal of the sexed subject as one in

C. Zeiher (B) University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 R. Overell and B. Nicholls (eds.), Post-Truth and the Mediation of Reality, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25670-8_3

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which wholeness might be glimpsed or even make an appearance now and then. However, considering Robert Pfaller’s (2014) important claim that objects, namely of technology play a pivotal role in staging and regulating fantasy and pleasure, it seems as though this distinction is a knowledge which does not have the function of demarcation despite it appearing so. The Best Offer illustrates the effect of this failure and grapples with desire as having a potential manifestation or being with objects of technology as a precise form of self-deception, but also settles for such limits to this being fully realised. That is, technology mediates the fantasy of love as a condition for desire. Moreover, as we will see in The Best Offer, technology allows for the possibility of love to occur and be lost. The Best Offer considers how technology facilitates mediation of love and jouissance for the subject. Here, desire and fantasy configure the subject of desire in The Best Offer trigger for the male protagonist, Virgil, a way into deploying impossible desire that allows access into the love relationship, mediated by technological objects. The subject’s relation with technology has an ambiguous function in The Best Offer. Technologies take various forms: aesthetic (portraits of beautiful women [Figs. 3.1 and 3.2]), functional (the gloves which explicitly

Fig. 3.1 Virgil and Claire

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Fig. 3.2 Virgil and Claire in an embrace

signify Virgil’s obsessive nature [Fig. 3.4]) and metaphorical (the automaton which eventually comes to replace Virgil [Fig. 3.3]). It is both supplementing and appeasing the anxiety of love and desire, as well as attempting

Fig. 3.3 The automaton

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to address impossibility raised by Lacan’s important claim: there is no sexual relationship. What does Lacan mean by this? To be clear, this claim is to be read in its most literal sense. In 1972 Lacan published his famous, L’Etourdit which outlines this, for its time, controversial claim. Of course, this claim has developed a life of its own in his subsequent seminars. However, when Lacan first said this what he is reminding us that we are ultimately alone in our relationships with others and that the function of sex is to separate via pleasure, rather than bind two people together. What Lacan is saying here is that there is no pure sexual relationship, it is an impossibility and only love can mediate this. What he means here is that jouissance alone does not establish a bond between two subjects. It is well known that Lacan distinguishes between pleasure (plaisir) and jouissance (1959–1960); the latter, sometimes defined as “surplus pleasure” and thus experienced as un-pleasure, is at once what marks the impossibility of the sexual relationship and the real interrogation of the subject into the logic of desire. Pleasure obeys the law and limits imposed upon enjoyment while jouissance is transgressive. Moreover, jouissance is the consequence of the mediation between the subject and the objet a, the object cause of desire (and also never an object to begin with, it is simply elevated to this form, as Alenka Zupanˇciˇc (2012) attests in her ontology of love), which is often distinguished in the literature from an object of desire per se. For Lacan different discourses project different relations—or non-relations—to the problematic of jouissance especially when he says that “desire is a defence, a defence against going beyond a limit in jouissance” (1966, p. 825). What Lacan means is that a necessary limit is set to the pursuit of uninhibited pleasure. Certainly, along with symptoms, the social bond operates within the function of prohibition. Our contemporary world is that of capitalist discourse, one for which technology is constitutive. For Lacan, this has at least two consequences: the first being that the super-ego cannot be considered as offering prohibitions, but rather an injunction to enjoy!; second, technology proposes the lost object (in the case of The Best Offer, the lost object is love) as potentially recoverable, despite the object’s impossibility (as well as the fundamental inexistence of the objet a). Nevertheless, we can still offer interpretations of such technologies—in this case, the film, The Best Offer—to analyse and theorise this tantalising non-relation. Jouissance relies on the mediation between the subject and the objet a for it to be achieved. Here we can turn our attention to the task we have set: the logic of the objects of technology to track the fantasy of desire. On the face of it, technology as a libidinal tool appears nothing more than

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masturbatory—and perhaps not an object at all! It offers nothing more than to offer a semblance of that of the lack being exposed. And it is this surface interpretation that is the most accurate for trying to locate desire. This semblance of technology comes to replace the mythical jouissance if a sexual relationship were possible. Despite the promise of technology fulfilling the void of desire, it ultimately fails because technology itself is an apparatus which does not lack or desire. It situates the subject who desires as setting the coordinates of fantasy and also as being the primary provocation of it. So how can we write about and theorise this absent relation? Let us here begin with Descartes who examined the problem of appearance and bodily mechanics. Lacan took Descartes up (perhaps a little too quickly) in his theorisation of what can be said as a way of attempting to mark meaning. He re-appropriated Descartes’s maxim, I think therefore I am into another subjective dimension: I think I am. For Lacan, Descartes asked a precise question still relevant today: how can the immaterial (soul) act upon the material (body) and vice versa? More precisely, how can the subjective recognise itself as one inhabited by unconscious desires and drives? Descartes invokes the problematic of illusion and unknowability, that is, the lines of demarcation between that which we see and that which we perceive we see; the image and the content it holds and what might exist (if anything) beyond its immediate appearance. The person we see in the mirror is not entirely recognisable. Further, although we know this, we act as if we know ourselves and our desires. Slavoj Žižek peels back the onion even further: we do not even know anything or matter of the appearance of what we are looking at. After all, how can we—when we are compelled by the superego to enjoy and that the will to jouissance creates a distance from that which is absolutely so obvious it becomes almost oblivious.

“I Prefer to Remain the in Shadows” The Best Offer is set in Europe, an ethereal, baroque bourgeois non-descript location which amplifies its psychological thriller genre. It is in part a love story between Virgil and Claire, the two central characters (Fig. 3.2). But more importantly it is also a commentary on the forgery of love, a deliberate trace of Lacan’s infamous claim that “love is to give what one does not have to another who does not want it” (1960–1961, 1965). That is, the drive and fantasy of love is ambiguous and a profoundly vulnerable position. Pfaller (2014, p. 5) offers a most cogent claim which stresses

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the contemporary subject’s ambiguous compulsion: that we are content with fantasy as “an imagination without an image”. This captures love as the most perfect imperfection we strive for and as one that is beyond the subject. The Best Offer explicates this position by posing the question of self-deception as intrinsic to the desire towards love: when we are faced with our subjective undoing through our own hand, how might we understand this when given the benefit of hindsight? The Best Offer is a film that grapples with the question of what propels the subject to risk everything for the experience of the vulnerability to love. To fully appreciate this film we must begin at the end, when wealthy and corrupt auctioneer Virgil Oldman unlocks his hidden chamber where he keeps priceless portraits of beautiful women (Fig. 3.1), only to find that they have been stolen by those closest to him, his lover Claire, his best friend and trusted confidant Billy and his young and brilliant technical artist Robert. What immediately transpires during this stunning moment is that he has been a fool to love and desire. Hitherto a modern-day cynic, Virgil’s only desire had been for the pleasure of art and the petit bourgeois privileges this afforded. From this position he risked nothing and gained everything. He had little time for people, either for love, for intimacy or for sexual passion. He allowed no room in his life for another subject to desire to for one to desire him. He was a man comfortable with his self-imposed isolation, declaring, “I prefer to remain in the shadows”. His lack consisted not in a hidden desire for intimacy—“talking to people is extremely perilous”—but rather in the pleasure of his own company and delight when cheating unsuspecting art buyers and collectors by directing Billy, his partner, to outbid other punters at his auctions. The priceless portraits of beautiful women in his locked vault (Fig. 3.1) did not insist that he speak to or even desire them. He possessed them all, whenever he wanted, for his pleasure alone. Virgil lives in a world of objects, preferring them to words—after all, he uses language to trick others and thus it is the very thing that cannot be trusted. For Virgil, it is the object which stands in for the word (rather than the word being the death of the thing). Here Virgil, a discerning spotter of art forgery, is adopting the position of the Master in that he obtains what others desire simply through being able to do so. For him, great art is where true mystery and erotic love reside; by contrast, people are stupid and transparent, or rather stupidly transparent. Upon realising that he has been robbed, Virgil discovers that, in the place of his paintings, the now-restored the eighteenth-century automaton has been installed, which, when he approaches it, assumes a life of its own

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by repeating the phrase, “there is always something authentic concealed in every forgery”. This pivotal part of the film allows for the portrayal of the sexed subject to be fascinated by the reduction of love to objects. The speaking object reveals the (non)sense of the universality of love. And yet it was the fascination with the assemblage of this object, which oriented Virgil’s access to the dimension of woman as embodied in Claire. This is a revelation to Virgil not only of how he has avoided loving another, but also that when he took a risk and fell in love, the woman of his embodied desire has simply replaced him with a machine. His desire to establish himself as beyond lack (that is, to full enjoyment) failed precisely when he realised he is not beyond fault. In the end he is the joke and his narcissism is wounded. He no longer believed in himself once Claire had left him. Further, he is alienated from himself and there is a sense that he will never be able to reconcile this because of his willingness to enter into the realm of love in the first instance. No longer can he stand in the name of a universal truth of love. The automaton as a metaphor of desire is more than just symbolic of the removal of the need to fully face another subject. It further signifies the possibility of sexual intimacy, which in Lacanian psychoanalytic terms however, cannot alone solve the problem of the sexual relation. Claire’s dismissal of Virgil in lieu of the automaton precisely articulates Lacan’s maxim: there is no sexual relationship. Here the automaton, the figure of technology is literal and stands in for the failure of Claire and Virgil’s love relationship (Fig. 3.4). Until meeting Claire, Virgil has successfully isolated the gaze of love by ensuring that this was its only function. His portraits obscured the problem of how to deal with another’s, namely Claire’s desire, his eventual Other. The unexpected presence of the completed automaton—that which repeats the truth—is a slap in the face for Virgil, a true moment of the only true affect which is anxiety. It signifies to him that he is no longer needed and is being disposed of, just as he had previously done with others. He was cheated, just as he had cheated others. Here is the answer from Claire to his question about love: she no longer desires it from him. Virgil had simultaneously and unknowingly become fragmented during Robert’s complex and skilful restoration of the automaton and it was his desire to see it perfectly restored (coming to visibility and presence) which finally undid him. The successful completion of the automaton ruptured the encounter between him and Claire because Claire cannot be an object or simply a figure of an encounter. For Virgil she is irreplaceable because she cannot be fully known to him. This is where the true horror of yielding one’s desire resides: that although Virgil desperately

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desires the machine to talk, the price is a direct confrontation with his own subjective demise. His lover and friends however, have taken this horror further. They have literally replaced him with technology, which eclipses his own human position and purports to dismiss his desire.

Love Is the Only “Best Offer” Virgil had said about the automaton (Fig. 3.3), “it is not the object itself that arouses my curiosity, but its contradiction”. At that moment, Virgil articulated at this moment his own desires to traverse his fantasy, to discover his lack. When finding the different parts of the automaton, he is intrigued by how each could possibly fit together. These machine parts are operating as a signifying chain of desire for Virgil because being found at Claire’s mansion (Fig. 3.4), they symbolise his growing connection with and desire for her. Finding each part represents a significant event in which the promise and fantasy of desire is intrinsically bound. Eventually, the machine comes to replace his beloved portraits. The automaton, the paintings and Claire are momentarily suffused in the prospect of cohabitation; Virgil starts to imagine what life could be like with Claire and how she could eventually replace his desire for his paintings and the machine. Let us here return to Lacan and his conceptualisation of the subject (1953–1954, p. 147) wherein it “[o]riginally locates and recognizes desire through the intermediary, not only of his own image, but of the body of his fellow being”. Herein, according to Lacan lie the limits of desire and knowledge. In this account love is situated within problematic structures of meaning. Here we are being confronted and tantalised with Lacan’s infamous contention, “it is not possible to say anything meaningful or sensible about love… the moment one begins to speak about love, one descends into imbecility” (1972–1973, p. 17). In Encore Lacan poses a leading question about love and its relation to jouissance in a way which is both humble and courageous, and which allows Encore to be read as provocative, but without pretending to offer enlightenment. Love is here portrayed as a great malady, as peculiar and as a problematic universal which maintains the subject in a dialogue between the disciplines of itself and knowledge. Lacan states that love is to give what one does not have to another who does not want it. The love relation between Claire and Virgil embodies this declaration completely. Virgil believes that if he loves Claire, he will encounter a truth about himself. However, Virgil is naïve, he does not know how to provoke love whereas Claire does. Virgil comes to recognise

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Fig. 3.4 Virgil donning leather gloves

that he is not complete on his own and that he can risk love to fulfil this lack. At the same time, he feels ridiculed both by Claire and by love. In reluctantly assuming the feminine position of belief in love, this is his best offer to Claire. His gloves (Fig. 3.4) function as the gatekeeper of intimacy and signify a tension between feminine jouissance and his pride. He will not touch another person without wearing them, he insists on his own cutlery at his favourite restaurant and operates his phone only with them on. He rationalises this as practicing good hygiene, but it is obviously much more. The gloves maintain his ability to keep love at bay, that is to say, that they function as a fetishised object. To gain entrance to his secret vault of paintings, he must walk past hundreds of obsessively placed gloves, which signify his virility, his masculinity but also his inability to bear the truth of another subject insisting that he loves. He takes off his gloves only to touch a painting, to caress it and be completely intimate with the possibility of it being more than what it appears. To touch a painting in such a way would be considered forbidden in any other circumstances. One does not leave a personal mark upon what is considered to be a priceless cultural artefact.

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Virgil traverses this law and in touching the painting, he is actually falling in love. This love, for Virgil is reciprocal. Although the object does not directly love him, it is the effect of the object on Virgil that he craves and this, for him, implicates love and passion. This implication is apparent to Virgil precisely because the paintings cannot speak; for, without transference there is no risk. In Lacanian terms, such a love relation is predominantly within the domain of the Imaginary. He eventually takes off his gloves for Claire in order to transmit a libidinal transference onto her. Let us elaborate on this further. For Lacan the desire to love has less to do with materiality than with impossibility. Lacan’s mirror of love provides the ultimate enchantment of being able to identify ourselves through seeing the Other as our desire, the best identification of all being that signified by true love. This is authentic love, a spectacle which unfolds endlessly and with which every experience shares a synergy, apart, of course, from hate, the opposite but equally varied and powerful spectacle. Being ourselves subjects of language, the desire to love (or not to love) is not so much a matter of material sexuality, but rather with our being caught up in the social structure and strictures which underpin our fantasy. Our desires, and specifically our desires to love and to hate, are thus not really our own, but created through fantasies influenced by those cultural ideologies which direct the super-ego imperative to enjoy! This commanding of our desire, a command we feel most intimately directed at us, is however no more than a trick of the super-ego imperative. In constructing fantasy, we establish the coordinates of our desire, both towards the object of our desire and to our relationship with it. As Žižek claims, “through fantasy, we are taught how to desire” (1992, p. 6). Our desires necessarily rely on lack but also on the object of our desires providing the impetus and the coordinates from which we can direct them. However, at the heart of desire lies the most profound frustration, this caused by desire being always misdirected or in any case no more than a screen for our own projections of ideal love. It is this impossibility, this very lack which insists that our desires remain in perpetuity unfulfilled, and which to a large extent is their driver.

The Elusive Object of Love How exactly does Virgil come to desire Claire? On the face of it, what brings them together is a shared anguish from which objects are placeholders for what cannot be said. Let us here return to the importance of the machine as standing in for how one directs desire in the world.

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Lacan (cited in McGowan, 2013, p. 27) states that “Never in our concrete experience of analytic theory, do we do without the notion of the lack of the object as central. It is not a negative, but the very spring for the relation of the subject to the world”. The conflation of the machine, the portraits and Claire ambush Virgil. Suffering from agoraphobia, Claire for a long time refuses to be seen or touched. She lives between the mansion walls (Fig. 3.5), only appearing when she is sure that no one else can see her. She is saturated by the objects she lives with that enable her to remain hidden from the world. In this way, the mansion and objects coexist on the promise of the Real: that her appearance will open up her subjectivity and further allows for Virgil’s hysterical question to form: what does it mean to be a man (specifically for Claire)? In one pivotal scene, Virgil and Claire speak on the phone, while he is gazing upon the beautiful portraits in his vault. His love for her begins to outstrip fiction, becoming increasingly present and erotic. He imagines a life with her as he traverses this fantasy and is now unable to imagine a way out of love. The enigma of love keeps the possibility of sexuality open. He is ready to assume a symbolised castration bearing lack. And isn’t this the whole point of love?

Fig. 3.5 Claire behind the mansion walls

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Initially at least, both Claire and Virgil are extimate subjects: Virgil in the symbolic and Claire as the stand-in for feminine failure. However, as the film progresses, we see in this assumption that we are being duped, and that it is within the place of feminine failure where Virgil eventually succumbs to his fate. That is, throughout the film it is actually Claire’s fantasy for the richness of objects which is being represented and not Virgil’s fantasy for the subjective wholeness love promises. Further, for Claire it is surplus enjoyment in the place of love which sustains her symbolisation. This is where we find that The Best Offer is about desire as much as it is about love: in an effort sustain difference, subjectivity is constituted via negation and its eventual impasse. The film directs a desire for love in two ways: towards the signifier of love and towards its embodiment. For Virgil, love initially has no place, a lack evidenced though his deliberate engagement with objects. He first encounters this lack when asked by Claire to attend her apparently abandoned mansion, which is nevertheless furnished with incredible and priceless antiques. Claire at this stage of their acquaintance is merely an anonymous and somewhat annoying client, requesting him to provide an inventory of the mansion’s contents for the purpose of auctioning them. Virgil’s only contact with Claire is by phone; she organises that he visits to conduct his valuations, during which time she remains hidden in a secret room. It is only when one day he feigns leaving the mansion that Claire emerges from beyond the internal walls. Hiding behind a statue he discovers that she is beautiful, fragile and vulnerable. Virgil is immediately intrigued as to the reasons for her self-imposed isolation. Soon after she reveals herself to him they become lovers. Eventually Virgil shows her his vault filled with priceless paintings for her to share with him. At this moment Virgil seals his fate; he is unwittingly reduced to being a personwho-wants-to-be (in love), rather than the one who is supposed-to-know (about love). As Lacan contends, only love will make jouissance kneel to desire. The paintings no longer provide Virgil the signification they once did, because he has revealed himself as a lacking subject who is willing to risk love as that which is beyond signification. Claire means more to him than his portraits. He is now willing to face her and as a consequence, face himself as a man who desires to love her. Claire, over the course of their love affair allows this to play out as the human quest inherent within the masculine logic. Her not-all presence of being is willing to be caught by the phallus as a gesture of love, eradicating (superficially, at least) difference. The tragedy is that for Virgil, his selfish past in which he risked nothing means he is ill-prepared for love and the consequences of losing it. This

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mirrors Virgil’s vocation: although he is skilled at spotting forgeries, he is one himself. The Best Offer employs a steampunk motif, a fusion of Victorian-era technologies together with a contemporary speculative aesthetic, privileging not only the object itself but also the hidden internal workings of it (Fig. 3.6). The assemblage of the machine in the human position as an answer to the object of desire and love creates an idiosyncratic space of fantasy. This belies the assumption that form and function are always in sync. The automaton, although requiring skill and knowledge to assemble, remains a structure that can never fully capture desire, but nevertheless makes a promise that it does. In this way the steampunk aesthetic operates as a background narrative infusing Virgil and Claire as subjects who are between worlds: a traditionally baroque re-imagined love which is still contemporary in that desire is always present and never lost. The highly perceptive and somewhat autistic bar owner across from Claire’s mansion attests to this fantasy. By remaining completely and apologetically in a space of lack, she traverses the cynical position of Virgil, but not necessarily that of desire. She is brutally honest as she obsessively recites numbers, which together with her uncanny insight unnerves Virgil. She appears to know that Virgil has been deceived and does not seem to care; we get the feeling that she might have known all the time. This kind of atemporality is a feature of the film—one cannot precisely locate the geography, the time period or the cultural zeitgeist. Virgil poignantly states, “time can make any kind of cohabitation possible”, indicating that the impossibility of love

Fig. 3.6 Virgil surrounded by clocks

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and intimacy for him is, perhaps able, to be imagined as possible under certain stable conditions. It is here that he starts to tantalise the idea that erotic life with a woman is indeed achievable. Virgil can be understood as a subject of irreducible lack. This subject for “late” Lacan is described by Lorenzo Chiesa as an entity in which “the real other as the inherent impasse and precondition of the Symbolic – which must actively be confronted and assumed” (2007, p. 6). This vanishing subject is marked through contours of lack and eventually subsumed as subjectivised lack. We are born into language, submersed into it and subjected to it. Yet we can neither fully never harness it nor escape the problem that language merely offers a specular identification with our subjective lack— we are linguistically always in production and therefore alienated from the Other, for which we yearn. That is, we are subjected to the field of language and to its laws but will never be Masters of them. The distinction here is between language and speech, speech being the execution of language by the subject. However, the subject is already alienated in so far as language precedes subjectivisation. More so, language is the only mediator between the subjects. It fails because one can never say what one truly wants to say in that words cannot fully convey desire. However, Lacan suggests that full speech has the potential to overcome alienation and is also a counterpoint to it because within the failure of speech, another intention or truth is revealed. This formalisation of speaking situates freedom as a selfstyled historical and interpretative problem and a theoretically dismantling of language and its relation to objects and thereby abstract the subject into a formalisation—via the divided subject and through the subject’s interpellation with technology. Freedom here is not an illusion, but rather, its existence is reified in social categories and relations. The German media theorist, Friedrich Kittler, himself self-confessedly influenced by Lacan’s categories, maintains important two propositions throughout his work on technology and autonomy: firstly, that information and communication gain their own autonomies and secondly, that we, as subjects, embody technological developments. By this, he means that media creates means of representation (subject and content) and that these are the product of their storage (the means of preservation and reproduction). But there is a price to be paid for this desire for continuity and subjective wholeness—that is, applications of technology command us and our daily lives as a discourse network, despite them not being entirely visible to us. Thus Kittler is suggesting that technological conditions are bound up within ontology. This claim and his style of argumentation are aptly

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summed up in his well known dictum: Nur was schaltbar ist, ist überhaupt [“only that which is switchable, exists” or more precisely, “only that which can be switched, can be”]. What Kittler is saying here is that we can understand knowledge only in terms of those cultural artefacts we use to employ its possible manifestation. Kittler tantalises the Lacanian desire for full speech through provocation of technology. It is useful to know that he was sympathetic towards psychoanalysis and even suggested psychoanalytic case studies to be “media technologies” since they adhere to a logic where memory and consciousness are mutually exclusive. Technology for Kittler is necessary because the subject is never fully revealed and furthermore, never fully present to him/herself within the act of speaking. The appeal of technology which obfuscates the crisis of lack and desire through “hiding” the subject who refuses or is unwilling to speak, is by no means a contemporary phenomenon. Technology resulting from what Lacan calls in Seminar VII, tragic or pure desire, for him, is both the neurotic and the normal position, normal in that one inevitably participates in both neurosis and perversion. As Kittler sees it, Lacan conceived of the body as fragmented before the subject even utters a word (1997, p. 94). Although the singularity of Virgil’s subjectivity is initially insisted upon by Claire, this fragments towards the end of the film where Virgil is left in a café, surrounded by beautiful restored vintage clocks (machines which operate to survey both time and regret) and is reflecting on the loss of both Claire and his paintings (Fig. 3.6). The chorus of ticking clocks signify both that time is precarious and not necessarily linear, just like the position of desire and its relation with love. The motif of the clock is here understood as a traditional individual timepiece rather than within the contemporary silent networked digital domain. Immersed within such discontinuity Virgil is surrounded by that which was stolen from him: beautiful aesthetics which also remind him of the marker and divider of time. Here seemingly out-ofdate technologies have themselves a function of exposing time precisely by their non-contemporaneity, reminding Virgil that perhaps he held out-oftime ideas regarding love. This leaves Virgil, the neo-pragmatist, simply not knowing what else to do. Further, he is left only with the fantasy previously captured by his desire to obtain and possess priceless works of art. This was his jouissance, which prior to Claire provided a hazy idea of a potential intimate relationship. The lasting impression Virgil leaves is that desire is a somewhat unavoidable utility and that there is nothing spontaneous about love—it is fully orchestrated. Claire bequeathed an experience of love to

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Virgil and this served to regulate his jouissance in a manner he had never intended. He was willing to share his most prized possessions with her and she betrayed him by stealing them. Mediating the subject via technology, as we have come to understand via this film reading both familiarises and defamiliarises us with our embodied lack and desire. But let us now employ another modality for articulation which lies beneath our discussion of the subject’s interpellation with technology: listening.

Listening for Desire Desire is not silent just because we cannot hear it. We are subjects of language and thus silence is an absolute impossibility. We have to contend with the noise which surrounds us as well as our own inner monologue. Breaking with technology does not mean that we wake up from our slumber that we are imbecilic to technology and need to return to the natural environment and one of a different and more deliberate relationality. On the contrary, we need to consider desire within a different dimension, as Virgil did: acoustically. This reconfigures the important question, Che Vuoi? to a different modality, a question also directed to the Other who is specifically our lover: Are you listening to me? This kind of question renews the tired question and struggle of how the beloved subject is interpellated into capitalism because it reveals that this is precisely the wrong question which we have been fixated upon, particularly in the face of late stage capitalism and its according failures. This new question, a response to the question of a new symptom is: can one listen when one is so distracted. This upsets the fall-back position of transparent rationality as subjects being the beneficiary of knowledge. It seems, perhaps, that technology is our other who is distracted and distracts us. However, behind this, underneath this new question is a continual sound, one that cannot be completely discerned by the subject, one that speaks to the subject, that the subject is distracted by and yet which holds much about what the subject is trying to say. We could say that it is white noise which is in the place of that which is hard to say, the unsayable. Especially concerning love. It is transfixing for the subject because white noise is a signal which cannot be deciphered, but which is all encompassing. White noise is often called background noise. It provides the comfort of knowing that something exists outside of one’s own inner monologue, but it does not promise that one knows anything or something outside of

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oneself. White noise does not purport to say anything, it is a messy noise which reminds us that we have an unconscious and it is a category that we must face an indisputable error: a recognition that we are fallible and like the technology we rely upon, prone to malfunction and containment. It is from this vantage point that we are forced to imagine from both a singular and imprecise form, a language to come emanating from the ineffability of the love relationship.

References Chiesa, L. (2007). Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan. Cambridge: MIT Press. Kittler, F. (1997). Literature, Media and Information Systems. Amsterdam: G&B Arts International. Lacan, J. (1953–1954). Freud’s Paper on Technique. Seminar 1 (J.-A. Miller, Ed. & J. Forrester, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton. Lacan, J. (1965–1966). The Object of Psychoanalysis (C. Gallagher, Trans.). London: Karnac. Lacan, J. (1972). L’Etourdit. Paris: Scilicet 4. Lacan, J. (1972–1973). On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge: In Encore: Seminar XX (J.-A. Miller, Ed. & B. Fink, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton. Lacan, J. (1992 [1959–1960]). The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (D. Porter, Trans.). London: Routledge. Lacan, J. (2002 [1966]). Écrits (B. Fink, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton. Lacan, J. ( 2015 [1960–1961]). Transference (B. Fink, Trans.). Cambridge: Polity Press. McGowan, T. (2013). Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis. London: University of Nebraska Press. Miller, J.-A. (1992). Love’s Labyrinths. Lacanian Ink 8. http://www.lacan.com/ frameVIII1.htm. Pfaller, R. (2014). On the Pleasure Principle in Culture: Illusions Without Owners. London and New York: Verso. Tornatore, G. [Director]. (2013). The Best Offer [Film]. Burbank: Warner Brothers. Žižek, S. (1992). Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York: Routledge. Zupanˇciˇc, A. (2012). Sexual Difference and Ontology. E-flux, 32. https://www.eflux.com/journal/32/68246/sexual-difference-and-ontology/.

CHAPTER 4

Postmodernism in the Twenty-First Century: Jordan Peterson, Jean Baudrillard and the Problem of Chaos Brett Nicholls

Wonder why I’m alive, now. (Koizilla 2018)

Introduction It is widely held within academic circles today that the term “postmodernism” is unclear, overly complicated and, perhaps, passe. Scholars who cut their academic teeth on this complex thought in the 1980s and 1990s now supervise doctoral students who have little or no use for it. This is understandable, since the term seems to have been exhausted in a plethora of debates. It thus seems strange to be writing about the concept in the present tense in the current volume on new conjunctures. This strange

B. Nicholls (B) University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 R. Overell and B. Nicholls (eds.), Post-Truth and the Mediation of Reality, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25670-8_4

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writing is necessary because in the popular imagination postmodernism is undergoing a revival of sorts. In the current conjuncture, postmodernism has become a much-used signifier, though not in a form that would be familiar to 1980s and 1990s doctoral students. If postmodernism once signalled the collapse of hitherto fixed social and aesthetic categories and the problems and ontological possibilities this collapse opens up, it now reductively stands in for dogmatic relativism, or, in other words, for the notion that individuals can thumb their noses at what is evident, choose their reality and be dogmatic or even militant about it. If we follow popular pundits such as Jordan Peterson, who is at the forefront of this reduction, postmodern dogmatism is currently causing a current crisis in (white, North American) social and moral values. I consider how this revival of postmodernism works in the current conjuncture in the global North. This conjuncture consists of a number of heterogeneous yet entangled developments. It will be useful to broadly outline these developments in order to locate the present discussion. As I see it, the current conjuncture consists of the following: the continuing failure of Marxism that was diagnosed by Laclau and Mouffe in their study, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985); the decline of neoliberalism as a result of the financial crisis of 2008; the rise of new forms of conservative nationalism in politics; the shift in the relationship between science and power, with its alerts on global warming science now finds itself on the wrong side of corporate and state power; the mediatisation of social life through new technologies of communication, surveillance and social control; the rise of a new form of intersectional political struggle; and the strengthening of extreme conservative thought, that is, the New Right. I understand the New Right in terms of Amy Ansell’s work. She argues the New Right “is deeply hostile to the type of liberal egalitarianism that marked the political climate of the post-war era”, and is organised around “the defence of individual liberty, market freedom, traditional values, and white racial nationalism” (1997, p. 6). I see Jordan Peterson as intensifying and popularising the ideology of the New Right that has gathered momentum over the last twenty-five years. His thought resonates with Evangelical Christians, paleoconservatives and white supremacists, particularly his direct attacks upon intersectional politics and liberal egalitarianism. The chapter consists of three overlapping components. The first provides a brief outline of the use of postmodernism as the figure of the irrational and dogmatic other. The second unpacks Jordan Peterson’s extreme conservative thought. And the third considers what happens to Peterson’s thought

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when it encounters an actual, so-called postmodernist, Jean Baudrillard. I turn to Baudrillard because he shares a set of overlapping concerns with Peterson, but takes these concerns in entirely different directions.

The Phantom Menace In the words of Shuja Haider, Jordan Peterson “rose to fame when he was captured on video at a protest on the University of Toronto campus, telling transgender students he refused to use gender-neutral pronouns”. As a consequence of this stance, he “has since joined the ranks of Logan Paul and PewDiePie as a YouTube star”, posting “videos of lectures online for his primarily young, white, and male audience” (2018). He has also written a best selling self-help book, 12 Rules for Life (2018), which champions an aggressive, truth-seeking individual, as the most natural means for social and personal success. Our interest in the current discussion is in the term, postmodernism. In his YouTube lectures and interviews, Peterson constructs his vision of the rugged individual as a counter-attack against what he takes to be the corrosive, decadent, nihilistic and dogmatic thinking of postmodernism. Curiously, and this is what the current chapter will consider, he argues that postmodernism is an unfettered continuation of Marxism. He thus uses the term, postmodernist Marxist, to designate this newly formed political dogmatism. The oxymoronic character of such a formulation would not be lost on the aforementioned 1980s and 1990s doctoral students. Peterson claims: the postmodernist Marxist […] pulled a sleight of hand and said OK if it’s not the poor against the rich it’s the oppressed against the oppressor. We’ll just redivide the subpopulations in ways that make our our philosophy continue in its movement forward. And that’s where we are now. And so for the postmodernists the world is a Hobbesian battleground of identity groups. They do not communicate with one another because they can’t — all there is is a struggle for power. (cited in Fuller 2017)

For reasons that are not clearly defined (anywhere in Peterson’s writing or talks), Peterson claims that postmodernism opportunistically grew from the corpse of Marxism. He argues that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in which class struggle seemingly comes to a logical and ignominious conclusion, postmodernist Marxists emerge to make the best of a bad job. Refusing to let the erroneous notion that history is the history of class

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struggle die, postmodernist Marxists, Peterson claims, spuriously reconfigure their thought and social and cultural differences replace class as the new form of conflict. The “sleight of hand” metaphor in the above quote is crucial here. It appeals to the conspiratorial imagination and suggests that postmodern thought, like its Marxist predecessor, is somehow a double-dealing fraud; that redividing the population is knowingly a grab for power when all the while reality does not conform to such divisions. This emphasis upon fraudulent opportunism strikes a chord with New Right empty signifiers such as “it’s political correctness gone mad”, and the notion that political power in a “left-wing” form is elitist and authoritarian finds traction in these ideas. There is also a sense that a siege is underway, in which postmodernist Marxism is on the attack against tried and true (North American) traditions and values. In response to this attack, Peterson and his followers, through social media platforms such as Reddit and YouTube, engage in a counterattack. Postmodernism is high on the list of targets, as are feminists and social activists. What is striking about this counter-attack is the language employed to mark its successes. Victories are proclaimed through typical titles such as “Jordan Peterson Completely Destroys Feminist Narrative” (EducateInspireChangeTV 2018), “Angry Feminist Schooled by Jordan B Peterson Logic!” (The Spinoff 2018), “Jordan Peterson Calmly Dismantles Feminism in Front of Two Feminists” (RobinHoodUKIP 2018), and “Jordan Peterson Calls Out the Pseudo-Moralistic Stances of Activists” (Abcqanda 2019). However, despite these violent metaphors Peterson is rarely aggressive. His performances during interviews, for example, tend to be calm and seemingly well reasoned. This calm disposition is, in fact, crucial for his followers. It demonstrates the strength of his thinking, and the strength of truth, as opposed to the weakness of feminism and postmodernism. In Peterson’s thinking there is a strict division between truth and power. Power is subordinate to truth. The problem with postmodernism, in Peterson’s thinking, is that everything becomes a question of power rather than truth. This means that postmodern thinkers must appeal to emotions or resort to cudgelling others over to their point of view. That postmodernism is a problematic term is, of course, not a new claim. The postmodern has long been considered by conservative thinkers as a dangerous threat to “non-ideological” and clear-minded thinking (Bloom 1987; Paglia 1991; O’Neill 1995); by feminists as a barrier to solidarity

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(Fraser and Nicholson 1990; Benhabib 1991; Meeker 1995); by postcolonial thinkers as Eurocentric (During 1987; Spivak 1988; Bhabha 1994); by Marxists as ungrounded, free-floating thought that merely replays the logic of advanced capitalism (Callinicos 1991; Jameson 1991; Habermas 1992), and by “postmarxist” thinkers as a condition that necessitates new modes of politics (Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Hardt and Negri 2000; Butler et al. 2000). Glaringly, Peterson manages to bypass all of these dismissals, critiques, qualifications and reformulations. The crux of his offensive is that postmodernism is a form of thought that mistakenly defies truth, logic and the reality of the real. The nature of this reality and the consequences of overlooking it are, of course, subject to much dispute. For Peterson and his followers, subordinating truth to power and dispensing with reality exposes the established social order to any political or moral claim, particularly the demands of the powerful or persuasive. In popular memes and comics, as produced and circulated through sites such as Reddit, we find echoes of Peterson’s claim that postmodernism equates to authoritarianism. In one typical four-panel comic, titled “Postmodernism defeated” (R/badphilosophy 2018), a besuited figure (which I will call the boss) stands with his foot on the neck of a subordinate laying on the floor. The comic reveals how postmodernism produces a situation of powerlessness for underlings: Underling: ‘Hey, You’re standing on my neck!’ Boss: ‘Well, this is a point of view. But someone could also say that you are trying to upset me with your neck’. Look, in the post-modern condition we create our own reality based on our internalised concepts. Given that there is no longer an objective truth we are free to create our own truth … As you see, there is no longer right and wrong just an infinite number of equally valid ‘stories’”. Underling: ‘But you are still standing on my neck’. Boss: ‘You never went to university did you?’

It seems the postmodern university education of the overbearing suited figure has served him well. Postmodernism allows this boss-like character to configure brutal practices in ways that shore up his authority. Postmodernism can thus be seen to be an echo of totalitarianism. Reality is not impersonal and able to be revealed as it is; it is whatever the holders of power decree it to be. In a typical move, Reddit readers linked this self-serving figure to the standard list of postmodern philosophers. This attack upon postmodernist

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Marxists names names. In the comments section there are statements such as: “‘Any idea is just as valid as any other’ — Foucault”. “‘Murder is fine’ — Derrida”. “‘Fascism is just a lifestyle choice’ — Lyotard”. “‘You get a reality! And you get a reality! We all get to pick our own realities!’ — Baudrillard”. “‘You get a hyper-reality! And you get a hyper-reality! We all get to pick our own hyper-realities’ — Baudrillard”.

The ironic point that these commenters make is not that Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard made these statements directly or by implication. It is that, given the nature of their postmodernism, they have no way of refuting these claims. Derrida has no basis for claiming that murder is immoral! Postmodernism thus outdoes itself in this depthless, ironic play and collapses, and appears as the perfect foil for the obviousness of reality and (North American) social values. Commenting itself is a competitive activity in which punchiness and irony are lauded. Commenters receive points from other readers for the pithiness of their mockery and are ranked accordingly. The “‘Murder is fine’ — Derrida” comment, for instance, tops the list with 106 points. With the postmodern denial of truth, it would seem, everything is permitted; murder, and by extension numerology, the flat earth and so on, cannot be distinguished from the claims of science or the process of history. In commentary on the vicious terrorist attacks upon the Al Noor Mosque and the Linwood Islamic Centre worshipers in Christchurch in 2019, The Australian newspaper columnist Greg Sheridan takes the offensive against postmodern Marxists to its extreme. He lays the despicable actions of the gunman firmly at the feet of the “postmodern view that there is no objective truth”. For Sheridan, the gunman’s toxic and confused manifesto echoes leftist “identity politics” and the postmodern view, as per Foucault, that social reality is a matter of individual choice. Sheridan makes this baffling leap of logic in the following statement: Two modern ideologies do find echoes in the Christchurch manifesto. One is identity politics. The only value the manifesto positively asserts is race. It is the Left that is making race and identity the centre of all politics. […]

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Finally, the postmodern view that there is no objective truth, that, as Michel Foucault put it, the ‘regime of truth’, rationality itself, is oppressive, allows everybody, not just people you like, to construct their own fantasy reality. As Christchurch demonstrates, those fantasies can be nightmares. (2019, p. 20)

The link here between the manifesto and the “left” on the question of race is an excellent example (for undergraduate students) of what philosophers call a false equivalence. That so-called “identity politics”, which in this context presumably means the struggle of LGBTQI+ and marginalised peoples for equal economic and social rights, and the discourse of white supremacists are, in essence, the same is at best an absurdity and at worst a toxic expression of a conservative loathing of liberal egalitarianism. My aim here, however, is not to directly defend postmodernism as a complex configuration of ideas against the oversimplifications found in the work of Peterson, journalists, and the views expressed in memes (for my part, I do think that the philosophers labelled “post” continue to be vital). My task here is to consider how postmodernism works as a figure of the menacing other, even though, as St. Pierre argues, in its North American incarnation it was still “deeply mired in humanism” (2013, 654) and its radicality blunted. My approach to this problem will be to explore, what I take to be, a significant nodal point, or master signifier, within the aforementioned examples of postmodernism. This master signifier symptomatically reveals the paranoid basis of the postmodernist threat, and allows us to consider what is at stake in this counteroffensive against it. As I have suggested, the counter-offensive against postmodernist Marxists is articulated around an important master signifier, “calm”. The phrase “Jordan Peterson calmly” proliferates online on sites such as Youtube, Facebook and Twitter, and is commonly articulated with signifiers such as “owns”, “educates”, “schools”, “destroys” and “dismantles”. This proliferation is such that it has even become the object of humour through playful tweets such as “Jordan Peterson Calmly Dismantles IKEA Furniture” (Bandits 2019), and “Jordan Peterson Calmly Destroys a Tub of Hummus” (Reklmpt 2019). For his supporters, Peterson’s calm disposition, as he unveils the absurdity of postmodernist Marxist arguments, is the disposition of truth and reason. No matter how thin or fallacious Peterson’s arguments are, and the oxymoron, postmodernist Marxists, is a case in point, a dispassionate performance sets the voice of reason up in a binary relationship against the emotional, passionate postmodern other. This adoption of a calm disposition thus performs at a structural level the

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conservative ideology of reason as masculine and emotion as feminine. It is unsurprising that Peterson’s reasoned offensives play to his reactionary white, masculine audience and are usually aimed at feminists and activists, who, in this binary structure, stand-in for the hysterical postmodern other. Why would a calm and reasonable voice be powerful in this context? At a superficial level, calm reason might serve as an antidote to the socalled irrationality of postmodernism. Peterson’s followers most certainly understand the strategy this way. However, the strategy of calm opens up a crucial question. If reality is as real as Peterson and his followers seem to think, how can it be threatened? How has reality come to be so fragile? Questions such as these might seem counter-intuitive. Surely the point that Peterson and his followers are making is that reality is fine, and the issue relates to the emergence of a reality-denying postmodern regime (the men in suits), as they would have it. Theirs is a calm offensive against this regime. However, this offensive and its effects are overperformed by both Peterson and his followers. It is this overperformance that suggests that the problem of the fragility of reality cannot be so easily dismissed. One Twitter user, Remo, provides a solid demonstration of this overperformance. In a hyperbolic tweet, Remo writes “Jordan Peterson Calmly DESTROYS/DISMANTLES/STUMPS/GOES FULL LOBSTER/TRIGGERS/EVISCERATES/OBLITERATES Feminism and Postmodernism in a Debate” (2019). No particular debate needs to be named here. The point is that in debating the feminists and the postmodernists, Peterson always comes out on top, and in a spectacular fashion. Peterson, of course, rides this wave of success that has been generated by this overperformance on social media. What Remo shows is that the epithets for his victory are incongruous with the effects of his calm and reasoned disposition. All of this suggests that this offensive against the so-called threat of postmodernism, by Peterson and his supporters, is not a reasoned calm at all. Peterson’s voice ends up not as the cool resolve of the vulnerable yet strong, but as the brash voice of masculine privilege defending reality against its detractors.

Peterson’s Thought I focus on the problem of reality because this is precisely how Peterson constructs the case for the necessity of rugged individualism as antidote to the threat of the irrationality of postmodernism. He does not, however, find this reality in the usual spaces of science and objective thought.

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Peterson draws upon the mythopoetic, spiritual reality found in the work of Carl Jung. Jung’s much cited notion that in “all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order” (Jung 1980, p. 66) is central here. Jung describes chaos as “an unending multiplicity. It is not formless, otherwise it would be single, but it is filled with figures that have a confusing and overwhelming effect due to their fullness. […] These figures are the dead […] the thronging dead of human history” (Jung 2009, pp. 295–296). If this throng overpowers us we will descend into “madness” and meaninglessness. In Jung, a collective unconscious, which consists of inherited instincts, archetypes and narrative forms, has formed out this chaos to underpin and shape social life (Jung 1960). For Peterson, the collective unconscious is equivalent to nature. The postmodernist Marxist is an affront to this nature. They threaten the order that has been forged in humanity’s grapple with the forces of chaos. He writes: The order within the chaos and order of Being is all the more “natural” the longer it has lasted. This is because “nature” is “what selects,” and the longer a feature has existed the more time it has had to be selected—and to shape life. It does not matter whether that feature is physical and biological, or social and cultural. All that matters, from a Darwinian perspective, is permanence— and the dominance hierarchy, however social or cultural it might appear, has been around for some half a billion years. It’s permanent. It’s real. (2018, p. 30)

Peterson’s underlying message is that it is time to return to the truth of Being to offset meaninglessness; it is time to return to what is real, that is, in his thinking, “Mythological representations of the world—which are representations of reality as a forum for action” (Peterson 1999, p. 20). We need to be clear here. Peterson is claiming that the real takes a mythological Judeo-Christian form. Despite the advances of science, as he puts it, the “fundamental tenets of the Judeo-Christian moral tradition continue to govern every aspect of the actual individual behavior and basic values of the typical Westerner” (1999, p. 6). Forged over a long period of time, these tenets are hard-wired into our psyche. As a consequence, part of “our brain”, he writes, “keeps track of our position in the dominance hierarchy” as defined by the tenets of the Judeo-Christian moral tradition. Knowing where we fit is, therefore, “exceptionally ancient and fundamental” (2018, p. 30). Our task as individuals is thus to eke out a meaningful life within

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the social order in the situation nature has deemed for us. In other words, we should be true to the Judeo-Christian constitution of (Western) Being. It should be noted that, for Peterson, being true to those traditions does not mean that individuals should be blind and slavish followers. His claim is that this tradition provides the necessary ground for a dynamic engagement with the world. The individual, it would seem, constantly faces the forces of disorder and chaos. Individuals can respond to this in three basic ways. In the first, the heroic individual faces chaos in “the belief that something new and valuable still exists, to be encountered and assimilated, regardless of the power and stability of the current position” (1999, p. 338). In contrast, the second individual is the “fascist [who] sacrifices his soul, which would enable him to confront change on his own, to the group, which promises to protect him from everything unknown” (1999, p. 312). The third individual, the “decadent”, refuses to join the social world, and clings rigidly to his own ideas—merely because he is too undisciplined to serve as an apprentice” (1999, p. 312). The postmodernist Marxist, it would seem, is in a decadent or possibly fascist position. As decadents, the postmodernist Marxists willfully refuse the reality of the social order and imagine a world for themselves. This tips into fascism when this imagined world becomes an authoritarian form of “identity politics” or “political correctness”, to use the language of conservatism. In this most ideological of formulations, Peterson is arguing that challenging hierarchy is unnatural. The destructive force of natural selection has no other operational form than competition and the struggle for survival. This dynamic process has been going on for millennia. The human species, ancient and modern, is a product of this process. To challenge hierarchy, in the name of liberal egalitarianism, is to contest the natural order of things; it is to attack truth in the interests of power. For Peterson, this unnaturalness is why postmodernism is wrong-headed and must resort to a “fascist” position to stake its claim. And, since postmodern ideas dominate the governing logic of institutions such as the university, according to Peterson, we have no way of adapting adequately to chaos. As a consequence, the bleakness of nihilism and meaninglessness have begun to engulf the Western world. As can be seen, Peterson posits a conservative version of the mythopoetics and spirituality of Jung. As opposed to progressive Jungian thought, such as David Tacey’s, Remaking Men (1997), which provides a solid critique of using archetypes as a rigid basis for the traditional division of the

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masculine and feminine, Peterson makes a case for the necessity of patriarchy. He writes, and it will be worth quoting him at length: The properly structured patriarchal system fulfills the needs of the present while “taking into account” those of the future; simultaneously, it balances the demands of the self with those of the other. The suitability of the “cultural solution” is judged by individual affective response. This grounding of verification in universally constant affect, in combination with the additional constraints of stability and adaptability, means inevitable construction of human groups and human moral systems with centrally identifiable features and processes of generation. The construction of a successful group, the most difficult of feats, means establishment of a society composed of individuals who act in their own interest (at least enough to render their life bearable) and who, in doing so, simultaneously maintain and advance their culture. (1999, p. 230)

In the context of the validity and necessity of the patriarchal system, the subject posited here is remarkably similar to the self-interested individual of liberal-capitalism. The argument is based on the thin claim, as I have suggested, that the long development of the collective unconscious, as it emerged out of chaos, has led to Western civilisation. Peterson is basically arguing that God is an unabashed white, capitalist. Peterson’s thought ends up making moralising statements about the achievements of Wetern civilisation. The scapegoating of postmodernism is thus crucial; it serves an anchoring function. Despite its esoteric nature, Peterson’s thought takes up a position in a binary relationship with so-called decadent postmodernism. That Peterson knows very little about postmodern and Marxism, as his writing and much fêted debate with Zizek revealed (Peterson 2019), is of little or no consequence. Two things are necessary here. The first is the floating signifier, “postmodernism”. The complexity of this signifier allows it to be easily articulated to irrationality and decadence. The second is the overperformance of the demolition of the decadent postmodernist, which takes the form of feminists, and so on. Peterson’s calm and logical disposition is thus negatively produced. He is calm and logical because he is not a decadent postmodernist. Yet since the postmodernist Marxist does not exist, his own calm disposition is actually irrational. The target of his attacks is a phantom! Against this phantom, Peterson contends that recovering the real will resolve meaninglessness; in his Jungian terms, the “fundamental reality of chaos and order” (2018, p. 49). The problem in the West, he maintains,

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is that “we have been withdrawing from our tradition- religion- and even nation-centred cultures, partly to decrease the danger of group conflict”. The “loss of group-centred belief”, however, “renders life chaotic, miserable, intolerable”. The Global North is, he claims, “increasingly falling prey to the desperation of meaninglessness”. What must be recovered, therefore, is group-centred belief and culture. In a replay of the mantra of the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, the West must believe in its achievements once again. However, and here we get to the nub of Peterson’s argument, the “presence of group-centred belief makes conflict with other groups inevitable”. It is better to avoid conflict, but such measures, no matter how hard they may be, will fail. As Peterson would have it, the fundamental and unavoidable “reality of chaos and order”, conflict, and hierarchisation within group-centred belief and culture and between cultures is a condition of Being. “Of course culture is an oppressive structure”, Peterson declares, it has “always been that way. It’s a fundamental existential reality” (2018, p. 205). Peterson’s claim is that postmodern thought, in the guise of the phantom postmodernist Marxist, has presided over the collapse of the real. But what happens when Peterson’s work actually encounters the work of a so-called postmodernist. It is ironic, perhaps, that the theme of meaninglessness is also central in the work of Baudrillard. Of the thinkers associated with postmodernism (though arguably he is anti-modernist rather than postmodernist), Baudrillard’s thought is, in fact, the closest to Peterson’s. Baudrillard considers themes such as the aforementioned meaninglessness, transexuality, Western culture, Marxism, cloning, the problem of evil, dualism and so on. Baudrillard, however, takes up the problem of meaninglessness in the context of the techno-capitalist present. This present, or an equivalent account of it, is completely lacking in the work of Peterson. Baudrillard, who is lampooned as an irrational postmodernist, in fact provides more insight and a deeper understanding of the current conjuncture than Peterson. In some respects, this chapter can be read as a plug for why we should be reading Baudrillard rather than Peterson. It is time to dust off that copy of Simulacra and simulation!

The Phantom Takes a Form: Baudrillard At this point, I want to explore what becomes of Peterson’s thought when it encounters a so-called postmodernist such as Baudrillard. What happens when the phantom takes a form? As I have suggested, Baudrillard and

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Peterson share a set of concerns. Both thinkers take up the problem of meaninglessness as a feature of contemporary societies. For Baudrillard, meaninglessness comes with the rise of the hyperreal. For Peterson, it can be found in the decadence of postmodernism. Both contend that there are fundamental aspects of ancient and “primitive” societies which contemporary societies can not discard. For Baudrillard, modernity attempts, to its detriment, to displace symbolic exchange with a system of general equivalence but never succeeds. As we have seen, Peterson contends that Jungian archetypes continue to structure the collective unconscious, social life and moral values. It is also the case that, like Peterson, Baudrillard questions the total liberation of the self from constraint and structure. I run the risk, of course, of making a false equivalence between these thinkers here. Peterson is, after all, a Canadian psychologist focussed upon the unconscious and the subject; Baudrillard is a French sociologist of sorts, who writes from the perspective of the object. They do not share conceptual terrains. My method, to qualify my position, is that the resemblance of the overlapping territories of these thinkers is formal rather than substantive. To explore equivalence here is thus to embark upon an impossible exchange, one in which the phantom of postmodernism takes a form and turns to face Peterson’s extreme conservatism. For example, Peterson understands meaninglessness in terms of the threat of chaos. In his thought, this threat requires, as I mentioned above, heroic subjects to draw upon its energy to situate it within the established social order. As opposed to heroic subjects, fascists hide from chaos and fail to draw upon its power, and decadents refuse to engage with it and succumb to wishful thinking. In this formulation, the postmodernist Baudrillard would not be decadent, fascist, or heroic. For Baudrillard, meaninglessness arises when the mystery of the object is removed by objective thought, and with the rise of total transparency in thought and life. If we consider how these thinkers overlap, the tension between order and chaos in Peterson would loosely equate to the problem of destiny in Baudrillard. As we have seen, chaos is a critical term in Peterson. It refers to the dangerous abyss of the unconscious which, when tamed, gives rise to the subject and social order. The analogous term, destiny, is a crucial aspect of Baudrillard. As opposed to the chaotic, which is defined as randomness and total disorder, destiny consists of the forces and processes which impact life, express telos, but over which there is no control. Baudrillard often tells this story to demonstrate this notion:

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On the town square a soldier sees death beckoning to him. He takes fright, goes to see the king and says, “Death has beckoned to me, I am going to flee as far away as possible, I am fleeing to Samarkand.” The king commands that death be sent to him, to explain why it has terrified his captain. And death tells him, “I didn’t want to frighten him. I simply wanted to remind him we had an appointment tonight — in Samarkand.” (Baudrillard 2003, p. 68)

The key point here is that despite the operation of the captain’s will, he decides to flee, destiny will prevail. Death itself is also caught up without agency in this play of destiny. For Baudrillard, destiny is a vital part of the double-life of Homosapiens. One side of life consists of what we might recognise as the life of the subject. That is, selves living in a historical moment as social subjects with a will, in the context of social norms, laws and so on. Contra Peterson, for Baudrillard there is no shortage of social order, and no external threat to it. It is only threatened with collapse by the weight of its fetishisation of its realness. This collapse is, perhaps, its destiny (see his work on hyperreality). Outside of this self, living also involves destiny and, what Baudrillard calls, becoming-object. He argues that through practices such as ceremonies and games of chance we open ourselves to the space of destiny, that is to spaces that require participation without the necessity of free will. A game of dice, for example, involves rules and possible outcomes. The pleasure of the game is in the fact that these outcomes are produced without the operation of the will. The space in which these outcomes are produced is the space of destiny. In encounters with this space subjects become objects. Destiny determines being. The central problem for living life, for Baudrillard, works in the reverse direction from Peterson. If for Peterson, the problem is to find order in chaos, for Baudrillard it is to connect with the processes of destiny to escape the boredom of social order. We might imagine a Baudrillardian selfhelp book would consist of techniques for establishing these connections. Crucially, Baudrillard is not asserting a decadent position here. His argument is metaphysical. “The world does not exist in order for us to know it”, Baudrillard maintains. Knowledge “is part of the world, though precisely part of the world in its profound illusoriness ”. And since this knowledge is part of the world, not a point of view from outside it, it will never produce an objective truth”. The world may appear to be a passive object that we can discover and control, but it actually controls us. And to be embedded in the world is the “becoming-object of the subject” (Baudrillard 2005, pp. 40–42). Becoming-object is thus, for Baudrillard, the primal condition

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of being. Unlike Peterson, for whom the tension between order and chaos is primal, this is a condition that does not determine how we should be. In the position of becoming-object, which is preferable, we encounter the illusory nature of the world and connect with its mystery. It is important to point out that Baudrillard is not espousing a version of esoteric mysticism, or that the world exists only in the mind. It is that the world cannot be confined to systems of knowledge or to natural social order. In spaces of destiny, we encounter something happening over which we have no control. This something happening can turn up in musings such as “wonder why I’m alive, now?” (Koizilla 2018), and “how did I end up here?” To be sure, some of these musings will uncover the work of the will, but also, invariably, a sense of becoming-object. Consider what is in play in Jordan Peterson’s rapid rise to media stardom. Is this a predictable, teleological process, or do we see destiny in play? Much needed to precede this rise. Electricity was discovered (in the DC versus AC battle, Tesla wins), later the internet was invented, and then applications such as Twitter, YouTube and Reddit. At a certain point, Peterson’s parents met … By chance, Peterson is captured on camera at a protest, and the video uploaded to Youtube. The video connects with news media reportage of the story, and YouTube users “like” and circulate it through their networks of friends. In circulation, the video resonates indirectly with the long rise of the New Right within the current conjuncture. With the circulation of this video, Peterson is called upon to comment about his part in the protest. Videos circulate. Peterson is called upon again. He must now formulate a position. Postmodernism is a term that seems to fit what he is protesting. Looking at this circulation of Peterson content on-line, a publisher contacts him, and on it goes. Obviously, this is a blunt account of Peterson’s becoming-object and his rise, but it makes the appropriate point. Peterson is as much an object of destiny as he is a calm and rational social commentator enjoying fame in his own right. To say this is a movement engendered by the long march of truth and reason would be disingenuous. At what point was there a demand for an esoteric, conservative Jungian to tell the truth about the world? It could be argued that this blunt account is trivial, and that the crucial point is that Peterson connects and resonates with his audience. This argument has some merit, but should avoid making the error of looking for a cause and effect structure. The truth is that the circulation of on-line content has no telos. It works through accumulation, numbers of views and likes, rather than the veracity of its mediations of the world. The phantom of

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the postmodernist Marxist is a case in point. This figure circulates online without any substantive content. It is thus not clear that Peterson’s audience are an effect of his calm and reasoned thought. It is just as possible that Peterson is an object or merely an empty signifier of his audience’s prejudices. Both Peterson and Baudrillard would agree that, as Baudrillard puts it, everything in the world is “admirably connected” (1990, p. 150) in the play of destiny. In Peterson, this connection comes in the form of the collective unconscious, which, as I have shown, gives rise to Western civilisation. In Baudrillard this connection takes the form of the destiny of objects. However, for Baudrillard, the crucial task is to face destiny in order to escape the confines of social order, not to cement it. This might be construed in Peterson’s terminology as decadence and irrationality, but this would be to miss the point. If for Peterson the contemporary world lacks order and moral values, for Baudrillard it suffers from an excess of rationality, so much so that it has begun to tip into irrationality (Nicholls 2016). And as Baudrillard argues, by extension directly contesting Peterson’s position on the tension of order and chaos, the chaotic world, which “we have to fight against by rational connections”, is a “flawed hypothesis” (1990, p. 150). Better to be an object in the world than to try to tame it. He claims, that “each of us secretly prefers an arbitrary and cruel order, one that leaves us no choice, to the horrors of a liberal order where we don’t even know what we want […]. Everyone secretly prefers an order so rigorous, an unfolding of events so arbitrary (or so illogical, as with fate or ceremony) that the slightest disturbance can make the whole thing collapse — everyone prefers this to the dialectical workings of reason” (Baudrillard 1990, p. 169). Baudrillard thus also has no place for the heroic humanist subject working to shore up the established social order. The Baudrillardian antihero, if we can name it as such, embraces destiny and stands “against the truer than true”. This stand requires us to “remake illusion”, he asserts, “rediscover illusion, this power, at once immoral and maleficent, to tear the same away from the same called seduction. Seduction against terror: these are the stakes” (1990, p. 51). What Baudrillard’s thought suggests is that Peterson’s chaos is not that chaotic. The heroic subject, for Peterson, faces chaos from the “safe space” of the white, patriarchal order. There is nothing here like Jung staring at the abyss of “madness” where “everything inside me is in utter disarray. Matters are becoming serious, and chaos is approaching. Is this the ultimate bottom?” (Jung 2009, p. 268). Instead, the hero can protect the social order by holding chaos back, or they can

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tame the fragments for the benefit of the whole. Chaos, as it turns out, can be remarkably productive. But, as Baudrillard asks, why “privilege the position of the subject, why support this fiction of will, a conscience, even an unconscious for the subject? Because the subject has an economy and a history which is quite reassuring” (1990, p. 112). This desire for reassurance with the notion that it is okay to be a privileged, white man, against the phantom menace of postmodernist Marxism, suggests that Peterson’s thought is reactionary and paranoid. Life is never separate from destiny and uncertainty. Despite every attempt to eliminate illusion through objective forms of thought and the simulation of the world in media systems, and, by extension, the positing of white patriarchy as natural, the illusion of the world remains uncontained. As can be seen, the postmodernist Baudrillard does not adopt a decadent or fascist position in relation to chaos. Instead, he posits a more nuanced take on the order and chaos dualism. The evolutionary development of hierarchical social order to keep chaos at bay, advanced by Peterson, does not have a place in Baudrillard. Instead, Baudrillard makes a radical claim. The truth is that the world is an illusion. Here we can see the crux of Baudrillard’s argument. Social life must learn to live in, and through, this illusion. In ancient societies, the mechanism of symbolic exchange achieved this aim. Following Mauss, as Baudrillard does, these societies lived in a dual relationship with the world. Becoming-object was the predominant basis for social life. With the advent of modernity, the West invented reality and attempted to dispel the illusion of the world. Crucially, Peterson’s appeal to the dual relationship within order and chaos overlaps with the postmodernist Baudrillard. Peterson’s insistence upon the collective unconscious can be understood as knowledge being part of the world. However, this does not lead to the becoming-object of the subject, it leads to the reign of the subject over the object. The championing of Western civilisation, and his argument that challenges to hierarchies are unnatural, means that despite Peterson’s suspicion of science and objectivity he falls into the modern trap and merely replays what Baudrillard would consider to be the appeal to the reality of the real. As Baudrillard provocatively asserted, the “reality that has invented itself over recent centuries and which we have elevated into a principle is now dying out. To wish to revive it at all costs as a reference or a moral value is a mistake, since the principle is dead” (2005, p. 17). This desire to revive reality, which, as I suggested is enacted in the overperformance of Peterson’s offensive against the phantom of postmodernism on behalf of the real,

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is a clear example of what “dominates our value system today”. As Baudrillard puts it, the “denial of reality is still morally and politically suspect” (1996, p. 46). This suspicion remains because the principle of reality itself had such a force that it “continues to run on out of sheer inertia” (Baudrillard 2005, p. 126). If we are committed to the notion that knowledge is part of the world, the appeal to what is real is oxymoronic.

Conclusion In the current conjuncture, postmodernism has become the signifier of dogmatic irrationality. It is much used in thought that resonates directly and indirectly with the New Right, notably Jordan Peterson and his followers. Strangely, though, this thought shows little or no knowledge of actual postmodern theory. I thus asked, what happens when Peterson’s ideas encounter a so-called postmodernist? My aim here was not to demonstrate how the sheer validity of Baudrillard’s postmodern thought would destroy or school Peterson. I am not sure this would be possible without begging the question or that it would be particularly useful. What I show via Baudrillard, instead, is how Peterson’s thought works in paranoid and conservative ways, and how this thought might be resisted. His dogmatic insistence upon the tension between order and chaos and evolutionary rise of Western traditions resonates with the chauvinistic and white supremacist New Right. At every turn, Peterson insists on the necessity rather than contingency of patriarchal order. From the perspective of Baudrillard, this insistence upon the naturalness of hierarchy and order is both intolerable and spindly. The overperformance of the spectacular destruction of the postmodern other hides what is by now a very thin idea, that Western civilisation is natural. The counterclaim, from the perspective of Peterson, that Baudrillard is merely decadent would not have any validity. Baudrillard does not think that reality is a matter of willful choice. Such freedom would, in fact, be more intolerable than the rigidity of social order. As he puts it, today the “master has disappeared. Only serfs and servility remain. Now, what is a slave without a master? A person who has devoured his master and internalized him, to the point of becoming his own master. […] he has absorbed him while remaining a slave — indeed, more slavish than a slave, more servile than a serf: his own serf” (2011, p. 75). On the surface, the implication of this intolerable freedom would be to call for a return to the master. We find it more tolerable to be told what to do. The responsibilisation

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of the self means that we become more vulnerable to falsehoods and fads because no one really knows what to do. Conservatives would be nodding in agreement. The decadent postmodernist needs to return to the folds of the secure Western tradition. However, Baudrillard does not make this move. Instead, he argues, and here he comes close to ideology critique, that “this freedom to become responsible, as a subject, for the objective conditions of one’s own life,” is a “relative freedom” (2011, p. 76). In other words, despite the modern liberation of the will, wants and drives, subjects are still objects of the world. The material conditions of our life and work continue to exercise constraints upon us. As I have suggested, for Baudrillard there is no shortage of constraint despite what an ideology of freedom and liberation might claim. But it is in the context of these constraints that destiny and play, becoming-object, come to the fore as both connections to life and being and as resistance to the patriarchal order and its so-called truth.

References Abcqanda. (2019, February 26). Jordan Peterson Calls Out the Pseudo-Moralistic Stances of Activists [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=qTk-69f64KU. Ansell, A. E. (1997). New Right, New Racism: Race and Reaction in the United States and Britain. New York: New York University Press. Bandits, R. [Rubberbandits]. (2019, January 31). Jordan Peterson Calmly Dismantles IKEA Furniture [Tweet]. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/ Rubberbandits/status/1090906814735101952. Baudrillard, J. (1990). Fatal Strategies. New York: Semiotext(e). Baudrillard, J. (1996). The Perfect Crime. London: Verso. Baudrillard, J. (2003). Passwords. London: Verso. Baudrillard, J. (2005). The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact. New York: Berg. Baudrillard, J. (2011). Impossible Exchange. London: Verso. Benhabib, S. (1991). Feminism and the Question of Postmodernism. Praxis International, 11(2), 137–150. Bhabha, H. (1994). The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Bloom, A. (1987). The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students. New York: Simon & Schuster. Butler, J., Laclau, E., & Zizek, S. (2000). Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. Verso: London. Callinicos, A. (1991). Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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During, S. (1987). Postmodernism or Post-colonialism Today. Textual Practice, 1(1), 32–47. EducateInspireChangeTV. (2018, December 14). Jordan Peterson Completely Destroys Feminist Narrative [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=JB9sfe_mQ1I. Fraser, N., & Nicholson, L. J. (1990). Social Criticism Without Philosophy: An Encounter Between Feminism and Postmodernism. In L. J. Nicholson (Ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism. London: Routledge. Fuller, D. (2017, 20 May). Insisting on Truth in Times of Crisis. Perspectiva. https://medium.com/perspectiva-institute/the-man-for-the-times-of-chaosjordan-peterson-2df43c24672f. Accessed 20 January 2019. Habermas, J. (1992). Postmetaphysical Thinking. Cambridge: Polity Press. Haider, S. (2018, January 23). Postmodernism Did Not Take Place: On Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life. Film for Action. Retrieved from https://www. viewpointmag.com/2018/01/23/postmodernism-not-take-place-jordanpetersons-12-rules-life/. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Verso: London. Jung, C. G. (1960). On the Nature of the Psyche: Collected Works (Vol. 8, pp. 159–236). New York: Princeton University Press. Jung, C. G. (1980). The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. New York: Princeton University Press. Jung, C. G. (2009). The Red Book: Liber Novus. New York and London: W. W. Norton. Koizilla. (2018). Lazy Hazy Dayzy. Lazy Hazy [Music]. Retrieved from https:// koizilla.bandcamp.com/album/lazy-hazy. Laclau, E., & Mouffe, C. (1985). Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso. Meeker, N. (1995). Rethinking the Universal, Reworking the Political: Postmodern Feminism and the French Enlightenment. Women in French Studies, 3, 21–33. https://doi.org/10.1353/wfs.1995.0011. Nicholls, B. (2016). Baudrillard in a ‘Post-truth’ World: Groundwork for a Critique of the Rise of Trump. Medianz, 16(2), 6–30. https://medianz.otago.ac.nz/ medianz/article/view/206. O’Neill, J. (1995). The Poverty of Postmodernism. London: Routledge. Paglia, C. (1991). Sex, Art and American Culture: Essays. New York: Vintage Books. Peterson, J. B. (1999). Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief. New York: Routledge. Peterson, J. B. (2018). 12 Rules for Life. London: Penguin.

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Peterson, J. B. (2019, May 15). Marxism: Zizek/Peterson: Official Video [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsWndfzuOc4. R/badphilosophy. (2018). Postmodernism Defeated. Reddit, n.p. https:// www.reddit.com/r/badphilosophy/comments/6ck2l4/post_modernism_ defeated/. Accessed 10 January 2019. Reklmpt [Reklmpt]. (2019, May 14). Jordan Peterson Calmly Destroys a Large Tub of Hummus for Him and Six Pittas [Tweet]. Retrieved from https://twitter. com/reklmpt/status/1128357119802126336. Remo [remOlino]. (2019, February 9). Me: Youtubers—Jordan Peterson Calmly DESTROYS/DISMANTLES/STUMPS/GOES FULL LOBSTER/TRIGGERS/EVISCERATES/OBLITERATES Feminism and Postmodernism in a Debate [Tweet]. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/rem0lino/ status/1094150527015890944. RobinHoodUKIP. (2018, 17 May). Jordan Peterson Calmly Dismantles Feminism in Front of Two Feminists [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=Ddzf9Mm4hdY. Sheridan, S. (2019, 23 March). A Manifesto for a Dark Age. The Australian, p. 20. Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the Subaltern Speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (pp. 271–313). Urbana: University of Illinois Press. St. Pierre, E. (2013). The Posts Continue: Becoming. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 646–657. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 09518398.2013.788754. Tacey, D. (1997). Remaking Men: Jung, Spirituality and Social Change. London: Routledge. The Spinoff. (2018, December 5). Angry Feminist Schooled by Jordan B Peterson Logic! [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= _xHRuGh2YsA.

CHAPTER 5

Truth, Post-truth, Non-truth: New Aestheticized Digital Regime of Truth Nina Cvar and Robert Bobniˇc

Introduction 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 posttruth a problem reserved exclusively for the sphere of politics or does it resonate as something still more far-reaching?

N. Cvar (B) Senior Lecturer, Erudio Business School, ERUDIO Education Group, Ljubljana, Slovenia Researcher, Faculty of Media, Ljubljana, Slovenia R. Bobniˇc Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia

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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, rather to address it directly, we will conceptualize its epistemic conditions, engendered in particular media technologies and its economic and social organization. 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, 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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Cracks of (Neoliberal) Reality and the Ascendency of the New Aestheticized Digital Regime One thing is certain, by being elected the 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump1 exposed the fragility of the neoliberal social structure and its ideology. Furthermore, with Trump’s spectacularized discourses of exclusion, aggression and hate, specific expressions and gestures, intertwined with the mediation of post-truth and fake news, something even more sinister has surfaced—a new type of aestheticization of contemporary political life, dangerously alluding to populist fascist rhetoric, within which scapegoating and conspiracy theories have become normalized and posited as standardized political discourse. Post-truth therefore cannot be understood without scrutinizing its representation, which in the last instance concerns the emergence of the new aestheticized regime of politics. As Walter Benjamin (1969) wrote in his famous essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, “the manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well” (ibid., p. 5), clearly connecting the human sensorium to (trans)historical conditions. Of course, the central question at this point is just what kind of historical conditions we are dealing with. As already stated, the current historical moment is one of neoliberal reality; however, we are facing its optimized version, which emerged after the 2007–2010 crisis. How is it then even possible to have aesthetics, politics, and mediation grouped together, if aesthetics tend to be primarily associated with art and not politics? It is Susan Buck-Morss who, by using Terry Eagleton’s terminological analysis, demonstrates that aesthetics was originally a field not concerned with art, but rather reality—corporeal, material nature. Quoting Eagleton 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.

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in Susan Buck-Morss (1992) “aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body” (ibid., p. 6), further continuing with Susan Buck-Morss (ibid.), “it is a form of cognition, achieved through taste, touch, hearing, seeing, smell – the whole corporeal sensorium” (ibid.). The point made by Susan Buck-Morss is extremely important, because it enables us to connect the phenomenon of post-truth with mediation, technology, and consequently fascism. After all, terminology is the bearer of genealogy. Providing answers to terminological questions undoes the incessant mechanism of genealogy, which constantly transforms contingency into urgency, constructing various structures of control and discipline that result in the formation of a discursive platform. Yet the question remains: How do we explain the merging of politics and aesthetics on the one hand, and the relation between post-truth, aestheticization and consequently fascism on the other, where mediation plays a constitutive part? The aestheticization of politics, where politics becomes a spectacle, is by no means new—it is most notoriously linked to 1930s fascism in Europe. However, it ought also be seen as a systemic companion of the neoliberal conjuncture, i.e. its reset version, which emerged in the aftermath of the 2007–2010 financial and economic crisis. It would consequently be wrong to argue that the current situation mirrors the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s. To prevent this type of conceptual oversimplification, we need to examine just how singular a moment in history we are currently living through. By emphasizing the singularity of the existing conditions, the following text proposes to employ Stuart Hall’s notion of conjuncture, which, contrary to its standard Marxist definition, denotes the role of the exact balance of forces. Following Tony Bennett’s interpretation (Bennett 2016), a conjuncture is “both a moment of danger and one of opportunity” (ibid., p. 284), an opportunity for a critical analysis of the current, what could be termed, a reset conjuncture of neoliberalism. But if we are to talk about this new aestheticized digital regime of politics within the current form of neoliberalism, we also need to consider a technical apparatus, since it contributes to a new technologically-mediated experience. As shown by Walter Benjamin in his analysis, technologized mediation not only brings us into the aestheticized realm of politics; rather, we are also faced with sensory alienation, which, according to Walter Benjamin, “lies at the source of the aestheticization of politics” (Benjamin 1969, p. 4). We are then confronted with the continued relevance of alienation as the specific kernel of the status of a subject and its subjectivization

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in relation to mediation and this introduces the problem of the imaginary and its relation to politics. From this point on, the problem of post-truth is not just a technical one—in respect to alienation, it is clearly political. It is also metaphysical, because both metaphysics and politics deliver a specific narration of humanization—metaphysics by being a unique register of knowledge and politics and through administering meanings, forged by metaphysics, incessantly deciding what counts as human and what does not and revealing the central conflict in the humanity of man, which, as argued by Marina Gržini´c (2003), based on the work of Giorgio Agamben, could be defined as anthropogenesis, as the process of humanization (ibid., p. 13). Giorgio Agamben showed that the notion of life is always political and therefore subjected to a mediated relation between the subject and object (of humanization), undisputedly marked by contingency. Yet, precisely because of the contingent character of mediation, the relationship between the real and mediation evokes the problem of representation and the very problem of its epistemic conditions. Laruelle’s critical endeavour on mediation and metaphysics and Beller’s thematization of the rise of capitalism through the prism of computational calculus are characterized by linking metaphysics to the so-called digital, resolving Western metaphysics’ rearticulation, evoking the problem of the incessant production of epistemic differences and once again exposing the hidden, never-ending story of anthropogenesis. For this reason, the incidence of post-truth as a mediated phenomenon is also the incidence of the genealogy of Western metaphysics, consequently revealing its potential criss-crossing with politics and the new aestheticized regime. If we claim post-truth does not represent a significant break, it means that it could be conceptualized as a digital regime of truth and contextualized within an aesthetics regime, which at the epistemic level still functions within the modern episteme, or, as contemporary philosophy would have it, within correlationism. In fact, the dominant critique of post-truth is operating within this regime. We therefore need an approach that would interrupt the correlationist conception of mediation. In other words, if we want to conceptualize the relation between the real and mediation in the moment of contemporary digital conjuncture, we need to formulate a theory of mediation that goes beyond correlationism and also beyond metaphysical entanglement.

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Short Taxonomy of the Theories of Mediation or Epistemic Conditions of Post-truth and the Ascendance of Digital Regime of Truth In a short passage where he offers a fundamental philosophical take on correlationism, Quentin Meillassoux recognizes the contemporary political situation that could lead directly to his unspoken diagnosis of the posttruth phenomenon. Since, with the emergence of the modern episteme, the question of absolute, as it was thought within classical epistemics, has been abolished, the road to the absolutization of correlation has been opened. Besides other philosophical issues, Meillassoux’s line of argumentation consequently takes us to a mode of scepticism that can explain the phenomenon of contemporary fanaticism. In the words of Meillassoux: “Contemporary fanaticism cannot therefore simply be attributed to the resurgence of an archaism that is violently opposed to the achievements of Western critical reason; on the contrary, it is the effect of critical rationality, and this precisely insofar as—this needs to be underlined—this rationality was effectively emancipatory; was effectively, and thankfully, successful in destroying dogmatism” (Meillassoux 2008, p. 82). To understand Meillassoux’s claim, we must dig further—not only into the history of philosophy, but also into the history of the Western episteme. In this regard, correlationism is the fundamental modern Western epistemic dispositif, as Foucault points out in the exceptional The Order of Things, where, like a seismologist, he examines a deep quake in Western thought. Foucault argues that a certain relation between the real and mediation, where the existence of the real is possible only as a fracture or the finiteness of representation, is the starting point of modern epistemology (Foucault 2002). The modern dispositif of the episteme, or, as we could say, correlationism, arises with the doubling of the finality of representation. This is an anthropological doubling, which attaches the finiteness of knowledge to the finiteness of the human being that in turn gives rise to the correlation between the real and mediation: the real is thinkable only through human mediation and never independently—in other words, the real is forever eluding human mediation. Friedrich Kittler, on the other hand, recognizes the figure of the human being on the basis of differentiation, which emerged concurrently with technical media—the phonogram, film, and the typewriter—and their recording of the real independently of human perception: “Once the technological diffusion of optics, acoustics, and writing exploded Gutenberg’s monopoly writing around 1880, the fabrication of

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the so-called Man became possible” (Kittler 1999, p. 16). Then, following Kittler, especially his claim that man is “determined by technical standards” (Kittler 1997, p. 133), we could claim that correlation is not only human, it is machinic as well, whereas the machine mediates the real. Of course, for Kittler, the modern conception of the real as something that automatically gives itself beyond human finitude is possible only because of technical mediation. Following both Kittler (and Foucault), metaphysics, based on the absoluteness of alphabetic technology, is therefore coming to an end. Laruelle, however, disagrees. Laruelle tries to show the persistence of the metaphysical dispositif through the notion of hermeto-logical difference: “Hermeticlogical Difference is a fundamental invariant, and a matrix for what is called ‘metaphysics’ in general. It is more powerful than its modalities or avatars, among which the hermeneutic conflict of interpretations, as well as the textual and signifying critique in hermeneutics, and all the possible theories of communication” (Laruelle 2010, p. 20). By using Laruelle’s conceptual apparatus—which will be later elaborated as the only apparatus able to withdraw from mediation as such and consequently to revision the question concerning truth much beyond simple proclamations about post-truth era—we could argue that there exists a radical identity between philosophy, metaphysics and the theory of communication. The extreme hermeto-logical principle, according to Laruelle, proclaims the following: “Real is communicational, the communicational is real” (ibid., p. 20). We can borrow Galloway’s terminology and name this principle the media principle (Galloway 2014, p. XX). When it comes to the theory of communication and the theory of media, this principle has become somewhat the main metaphysical and philosophical refuge. However, before we delve into the meaning of Laruelle’s non-standard thinking on mediation—a thinking, not based on epistemic or techno-epistemic conditions of existence of truth—we will first present a short taxonomy of mediation theories.

Cultural-Mathematic Complex of Mediation We can see that Laruelle literally requires a certain measure of rearticulation of the history of communication and media theory. Through this kind of rearticulation, we can recognize the common space of the fundamental dichotomy between linguistic theories of communication on the one hand

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and technological and mathematical ones on the other. But the hermetological framework encapsulates both, including Stuart Hall’s cultural and C. E. Shannon’s mathematical model of communication—two original, contradictory, and influential contributions to the concept of communication and the media in the past century, through which we will outline the taxonomy of a standard mediation theory. We will pursue three theses in order to contextualize the phenomenon of post-truth: first, we claim that both models of communication, linguistic and mathematical, are hermeto-logical, which means that they function as modalities of the “real is communicational, the communicational is real” formula; second, the disappearance of the real is only a problem from the perspective of language, where language is understood as the ontology of mediation; third, we claim that it is therefore necessary to understand digitization as the mediation of the real through numerical ontology; on the level of relations between the real and mediation nothing changes, except that the mediation becomes machinic and digital. Let’s proceed with Stuart Hall’s model, probably the most significant contribution of British cultural studies to communication and media studies. Hall understands the exchange of meaning structurally: he proposes a model of coding and decoding by which he defines communication as a series of structurally connected elements of production, circulation, distribution and reproduction. In Hall’s arrangement, we recognize the quest for the immanent structure of the mode of production, which would simultaneously explain both the production of goods and the production of meaning—or as Foucault puts it: “We have to produce the truth in the same way, really, that we have to produce wealth, and we have to produce the truth in order to be able to produce wealth” (Foucault 2003, p. 25). However, under the influence of political and economic transformations and under the influence of Gramsci’s convertible relationship between economy and culture, production and reproduction, base and ideology, real and mediation, Hall circumscribes production of truth as a specific production sphere with its own logic, which is the logic of language. Quoting Hall: “Production, here, constructs the message” (Hall 1991, p. 118). This means that for the production to take place, the mass media institution must use the encoding process, which for Hall, whether we are dealing with discursive, visual or sound material, is always based on language: “Reality exists outside language, but it is constantly mediated by and through language: and what we can know and say has to be produced in and through discourse.

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Discursive ‘knowledge’ is the product not of the transparent representation of the ‘real’ in language but of the articulation of language on real relations and conditions. Thus, there is no intelligible discourse without the operation of a code” (ibid., p. 121). Hall consequently defines coding and decoding as two constitutive aspects of every communicational process, meaning that production relations, technical infrastructure, and professional ideologies are already embedded in the discourse. However, this is also the exact topological point where the hegemonic struggle can get jammed, as for Hall, social order is constituted within communication by being based on a dominant map of meaning, which organizes and directs living cultural experiences. It is therefore unjustified to the early tradition of cultural studies to hear claims, for example indirectly from as Katerina Kolozova in Toward a Radical Metaphysics of Socialism: Marx and Laruelle, that the real simply disappears out of the question. To quote K. Kolozova: “Thus, the real is declared as meaningless, and as such, an irrelevant subject for social theory in the academically established disciplines of the humanities. How we construct the realities of our existence has become the only epistemologically relevant issue in the era of poststructuralism” (Kolozova 2015, p. 18). Unlike Jean Baudrillard, who attributes the loss of the real to the prevalence of technical mediation, or to be more precise, to the triumph of the third order of simulation (Baudrillard 1994), the evasion of the real can be most conceptualized within language ontology in contrast to, for example, sound ontology. As we have already mentioned, Kittler, by analysing gramophone, film, and typewriter, showed that with the emergence of technical media, alphabetic monopoly exploded, replacing language as a dominant (social) ontology with mathematics. The real, symbolic and the imaginary are the effect of a technical mediation, meaning that the real simply evokes linguistic, and consequently also human, control. In addition, it is good to remember Geert Lovink’s formulation, which goes hand in hand with his demand for resistance against the mathematical form of networks: “there is no evidence that the world is becoming more virtual. Rather the virtual is becoming more real” (Lovink 2011, p. 13). As Alexander Galloway condenses the idea, the computer simulates metaphysics, “in short, the computer does not remediate other physical media; it remediates metaphysics itself” (Galloway 2012, p. 20). However, it was Shannon’s mathematical communication theory that played an important role in formulating such remediation.

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The central issue in Shannon’s theory, as summarized by Warren Weaver (1964), is the question of probability. Communication is an exchange of meaning, encoded on the side of the transmitter and decoded on the side of the receiver. Yet for Shannon and Weaver, the meaning is in fact irrelevant, as they are both interested in information. The information does not concern the question of what you say, but what you can say; information is the degree of randomness, depending on entropy, within the process of encoding and decoding a message. The greater the randomness, the greater the freedom, the greater the entropy, the more information—everything is based on statistics, if we simplify it. Going further, the probability results in a formula that with a certain accuracy predicts the future based on past performance. However, this is also a precise definition of the feedback loop, meaning that it is possible to calculate which sign will follow the already coded sign. At first, it seems that Shannon and Weaver overlook any social, political, historical or institutional context, but this is not the case, as they rather try to find a universal mathematical articulation that can translate and explain such a context. Consequently, a mathematical theory of communication, like cybernetics, encompasses communication at the level of the universal, at the level of man, animal, machine or matter. Based on this kind of mathematical calculation of probability, an algorithmic network of communication is formed, which basically functions as the mechanism of a digital regime of truth. When we say digital regime of truth, we mean it literally. This is the regime that is based on statistical, mathematical and logical operations which regulate circulation and groupings of statements and social media posts through probabilistic processing of data, for instance, liking, sharing, etc. However, to simply presuppose that we are dealing with the loss of the real here, is to miss an important theoretical point, as we are actually dealing with a new form of mediation of the real. It is a mediation that conditions contemporary aestheticization of politics and constructs a social reality, which differentiates itself from massmediated social reality. The phenomenon of post-truth is consequently the phenomenon of self-regulated network and platform based digital ecosystem and its presupposed flat ontology between truth and opinion, meaning that the truth equals communication. In this vein, we can proceed with the thesis that the digital regime of truth is genealogically indebted to the metaphysical dispositif on one hand and to the dispositif of liberal governmentality on the other.

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The Mathematics of Liberalism If the theory of communication at the level of language operates through the universality of the signification, by which the real is eluded in such a way as to give the postmodern narration power to declare it obsolete, the theory of communication at the level of mathematics operates through the universality of calculation or computation. We are therefore dealing with two different social and political ontologies: cultural and mathematical. For both ontologies, the formation of order is central, but with a significant difference: while the cultural-Marxist theory emphasizes the importance of antagonism, mathematical and cybernetic theory highlight the importance of self-regulation, which is constituted through a feedback loop. To quote Adrian Lahoud: “Under this cybernetic ethos, transformation is not directed towards a distant goal that is known in advance. Instead, it follows immanent tendencies, guiding them forward—but also giving them space to evolve. The city or territory is understood here as a contingent, self-regulating resource that requires ongoing management. The goal of this management is to secure a natural equilibrium and keep emergent forces in balance” (Lahoud 2015, p. 48). This is a disposition that Foucault first conceptualized as a dispositif of security, but later as liberal governmentality (Foucault 2009). Basically, this is a liberal-cybernetic ethos, embedded in a network at the level of the general economy, which also includes the economy of truth. Or as Lovink would put it, social networks are a product of the economy, which is the product of mathematics (Lovink 2011, p. 6); or to quote Galloway: “The economy today is not simply driven by software (symbolic machines); in many cases the economy is software, in that it consists of the extraction of value based on the encoding and processing of mathematical information. Monsanto, Equifax, or Google—they are all software companies at some basic level. As one of the leading industrial giants, Google uses the pure math of graph theory for monetary valorization. […] Software consists of symbolic tokens that are combined using mathematical functions (such as addition, subtraction and true-false logic) and logical control structures (such as ‘if x then y’). Simply put, software is math. Computer science is a division of mathematics” (Galloway 2013, p. 358). If a computer or computer-network communication simulates metaphysics—let us not forget that for Laruelle, communication and metaphysics are in a state of radical hermeto-logical identity—it is simulated through automated algorithmic calculations. In its social-organizational

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sense, this means that the regime of truth is based on the algorithmic mediation of the real, that is on intrinsic valorization in the form of platform economy. The model of the platform has itself risen “out of internal needs to handle data” and it “became an efficient way to monopolise, extract, analyse, and use the increasingly large amounts of data that were being recorded” (Srnicek 2017, p. 30). Following Galloway, there is a suspicious homology between mathematical ontology, for example, Meillassoux’s ontology, and the logic of computation. For Galloway, the mathematical ontology is not an ontology of the real as Meillassoux presupposes, but the entry of mathematics into history—at the level of epistemology and at the level of production. That is why for Galloway, we must make a choice between realism and materialism. It is by this choice, as we will see, that Laruelle finds his way. In Galloway’s words: “Is a philosopher following an ontological absolute or following material history? Do real networks of object relations produce history, or does history produce real networks of objects relations? The answer to the question will indicate how any given person stands in today’s debate. Either one prizes pure ontology in the form of the absolute, the One, the infinite, what one used to call God. Or one prizes the historicity of worlds, saturated as they are with all the details of material life. In short, the ‘real’ in philosophical realism means the absolute. Whereas for a materialist, the ‘real’ means history” (Galloway 2013, p. 364).2 Or, let us add, one abandons both, the realistic and materialistic philosophical conception of the real altogether. To abandon the philosophy as such—this is the practice of François Laruelle.

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).

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Rigorous Science of Truth: Laruelle’s Theory of Non-philosophy As we have already stated, in his text, The Truth According to Hermes: Theorems on the Secret and Communication, Laruelle suggests that the dominant thinking mode of both philosophy and communication theory is hermeto-logy, its fundamental principle being the principle of correlation: “Hermeto-logical Difference is the indissoluble correlation, the undecidable coupling of truth and its communication” (Laruelle 2010, p. 19). To break with this hermeto-logical mode of thought, Laruelle formulates an approach that basically understands truth as a secret: “[T]o let the philosophers in on the secret, to substitute for the hemeneuts and the hermetologists in general a new group whom we shall call the ‘hermeticians’, that is, finite or ordinary individuals and as such subjects (of) the rigorous science of truth” (ibid., p. 21). At this point one thing is certain, the truth, to be the truth, does not need to be communicated, as it functions as a secret, which in the last instance determines the communication. “Between the secret and communication there only exist determinative relationships that are unilateral, asymmetrical, or irreversible” (ibid., p. 21). However, this condensed version of Laruelle’s method of non-philosophy and non-mediation will base our final thematization of the relation of real and mediation. Laruelle’s fundamental axiom is proclaiming: “Philosophy evidently does not exhaust thought” (Laruelle 2017, p. 164). In essence, this is one of the great Marx’s discoveries, as we need to remember, following Althusser, that Marx was the one who tried to break with philosophical non-historic auto-position, predicting “a kind of discourse which anticipates what will one day perhaps be a non-philosophical theory of philosophy” (Althusser 2001, p. 27). Of course, non-philosophical and in a way a non-Marxist theory of philosophy has been here for quite some time in the form of Laruellian non-philosophical use of philosophy from the perspective of the real before its mediation and alienation in the hermeto-logical difference or as Laruelle puts it, in the philosophical decision. The philosophical and metaphysical automatism—itself expanded by the theory of communication—based on empirico-transcendental doublet, prohibits itself to think the real in its identity. The real is divided and it is there to be mediated by the terms other than its own—a high point being the deconstruction of metaphysics through the concept of the other. The philosophical prohibition, its correlationist structure of difference, is precisely that it cannot think the real as the real. To think in one, this is

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Laruelle’s practical and political axiomatic. The practice of non-philosophy is to think in one, it is to think accordingly to identity of all thought—a democracy in thought, not thought about democracy. This is the precise reason why the symbol of identity of the real is the one. Non-philosophy is therefore radical, but also humble, or to put it with Laruelle, ordinary. The practice of non-philosophy postulates that it is not possible to think about the real—which always paves the philosophical way of thinking the real as something (other)—but only according to the real. “[If ] then the One itself is thought, then this thinking is (though in-thelast-instance) itself ‘in-One’ or a participle of the One in its mode, immanent and not reflected or circular: it is the force-(of)-thought” (Laruelle 2017, p. 26). Laruelle’s non-philosophical withdrawal from correlation is not to instate philosophy of the real beyond correlation, the real as object or as the contingent materiality of reality as such. The radical identity of the real is immanent only to itself—the real is the real, the one is the one, it is one-in-one. The real cannot be defined, each definition of the real is only its part, meaning that each definition is literally a partial definition, definition of that part of the real. But, do not get fooled: the real is not the same as ideal, as to say that the real is ideal is only a partial definition, the definition of the ideal. The same goes with material definition … Laruelle never claims that idealistic or materialistic definitions of the real are wrong, that the real is misinterpreted, instead, he claims they subjugate the real to something other than itself. To think in an immanent materialistic mode as in nonphilosophy, is to think as material part of the real, which is to say, that the real determines-in-the-last instance.3 In one of their introductions to 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.

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Laruelle’s thought, Mullarkey and Smith are summarizing as follows: “The Real is in-different (and so One or identical) to all decisions because it is more than all decisions, though not in such a way that it becomes a mystery, ad hoc, or superfluous. And to realise this, if only for a moment, is not another decision (or even a meta-decision) but a revision of what all decisions are, that is, immanent material parts rather than transcendent immaterial representations” (Mullarkey and Smith 2012, p. 8). Another way to put Laruelle’s revision of thought is to say that non-philosophy is “a thought according to real experience” (Laruelle 2017, p. 5), meaning experience, in the last instance of course, in its immanent way. Considering Laruelle’s revision of thought, philosophy is an apparatus of capture of the real, to represent it and to reflect on it. But what kind of apparatus is a philosophical apparatus? A philosophical apparatus represents the world, to shed a light on the world, to take a picture of the world and then to find the possibility of the object in the picture in the world.4 Laruelle is very clear at this point, claiming that philosophical and metaphysical dispositifs in general are based on onto-photo-logic, a vision of conceptual mediation (correlation) of thought and the world. There are “isomorphic structures of philosophy and photography” (Greve 2017, p. 83), of decisional apparatus of philosophy and apparatus of photography. Laruelle’s non-philosophy is therefore a revision of onto-photo-logic of Western thought and a starting point of a non-philosophical theory of mediation and media. It could be said, from the perspective of theory of media (technology), that philosophy is always already a media problem. For Laruelle this is then the problem of ontophoto-logic. “Onto-photo-logic is the hybrid of the real and of the photo in the name of the object” (Laruelle 2011, p. 64). To put it even more straightforwardly, onto-photo-logic presupposes a correlation between the object on the photo and the real, between a sign and a thing, between transcendental and empirical. Strange as it may seem, Laruelle finds a revision of onto-photo-logic in the practice of photography itself. There, in the photography, is a theory of vision itself, without correlation to the world and to the transcended object

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.

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or as Laruelle claims, object-form. Photography is a new non-philosophical thinking—this is photography’s great historical novelty—not because of its aesthetic and technological manifestations but because of its non-relation to the real. Photography is an “automatic and irreflective thought” (ibid., p. 32), it is a new description of the real, the image of the real as the real.5 If we consider this media practice in its immanent manner, as Laruelle does, then there is an identity of photography, the being-photo (of) photo, the being-in-photo: an immanent theory of a vision. From the perspective of being-in-photo, there is no ontological difference between the represented object and the representation of the object, there is only identity of beingin-photo. “One does not photograph the World, the City, History, but the identity (of) the real-in-the-last-instance which has nothing to do with all of that; the rest is mere ‘objective givens’, means or materials necessary to an immanent process” (ibid., p. 48). For our purpose, then, it is important that there is a determination of the vision, called vision-force, before its techno-perceptual and techno-aesthetic manifestation. This is the reason why Laruelle argues, that photography “rests on a material support, on a symbolic order, here the technologico-perceptual complex” (ibid., p. 37) and why in the last instance this complex is determined by the real—it is an immanent part of the real. For Laruelle, contra Kittler and theory of his media(tion) as such, the techno-episteme is only an occasional cause, a support—the medium in its proper sense—which is in the last instance determined by something non-technological and non-mediated. Laruelle’s theory of mediation is not based on media technologies, their epistemic and ontological operations, but on the immanent identity of mediation, as material part of the real. In other words, we need to conceptualize media technologies, but in the last instance, in their non-technological and non-mediated way, which means non-philosophically. However, if post-truth is conceptualized as a phenomenon of the digital techno-episteme of platform automated economy, as intended by this text, of what use is this in regard to Laruelle’s theory? First, we can show that digital mediation (an automated machinic correlation) can be conceptualized as the reproduction of an hermeto-logical mode of thinking, presenting 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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such a claim in a non-philosophical way, which understands philosophy as digital from the very beginning. Second, by employing Laruelle’s theoretical endeavour, we can literally embark on the entry point of the theory of digital mediation, although without its cultural or mathematical determination, demonstrating that the cultural-mathematical complex is just a material and symbolic support for digital mediation. Digitization is immanent to philosophical the hermeto-logical structure, because digitization is a process that functions through a binary logic of difference. The herme-tological principle—as Galloway interprets Laruelle— is actualized and updated through the computer, through the principle of sufficient computation: “This principle states that, within the standard model, anything co-thinkable is also computable. The mere existence of something is sufficient grounds for its being computable (co-thinkable). The computational decision is the event that inaugurates such a distinction” (Galloway 2014, p. 111). Just as a computer can reproduce the functionality of other machines in terms of logic, the principle of sufficient digitization functions as if everything is subject to differentiation, meaning that computation functions on the premise that everything is information. “Meaning, always more meaning! Information, always more information! Such is the mantra of hermeto-logical Difference, which mixes together truth and communication, the real and information”, Laruelle states (2010, p. 22). Information is a philosophical decision to interpret the real within transcendent mode, as a discrete state and its difference; at the mathematical level, this is the difference between the zero and the one. What is more, more information equals more capital. As we have already stated, capital is a computation machine, currently and especially in the case of social media based on economy of the platform. By scrutinizing worldmedia systems and their relation to capitalism, Jonathan Beller, in his latest book The Message Is Murder: Substrates of Computational Capital (Beller 2017), exposes their entanglement with capitalism’s appropriation of social contexts, capitalism’s inherent social practices of racism and patriarchy, basically arriving at the same problem regarding the status of metaphysics as Laruelle does. If Laruelle’s concept of the digital aims at nothing less than a revision of what counts as (Western) thought, taking it well beyond the hype of (Western) philosophical mastery into a materialism that sees philosophy as only one kind of thinking, one part of what he calls the one, Beller, by underlining the relationship between the informatization of social difference and value-form, links mediation, capitalism and production of

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thought regimes and discloses that these processes are basically driven by the digital core of the Western matrix. At this point, we could commence with the articulation of digital mediation in regard to Laruelle’s theory. To be sure, Laruelle’s theory of digital mediation is not against the digital, it is simply and radically a non-digital (non-philosophical) theory of the digital, although is not analogue either. For this reason, from the perspective of non-philosophy, there is no difference between the regime of truth and the regime of post-truth, as both are still posited as the mediation of the real. In theory, there is no need to comment on something so vague as post-truth, but instead to practice it as a non-mediated conception of truth, a non-truth perhaps? But do not get fooled again. We are not proclaiming that the problem of the post-truth is in itself fake. This would be just another example of post-truth conception, that understands truth as communication. As we have already stated in the beginning, the problem of post-truth should be regarded as the incidence of the genealogy of Western metaphysics, with its criss-crossing with politics and aesthetics. It is precisely for this criss-crossing, or rather entanglement of politics and aesthetics, as we are arguing in this text, that post-truth is rather just a new aesthetic (mediation) regime.

Conspiracy, a General Form of Post-truth? (A Case Study) Before we conclude, let’s present a case study of post-truth, represented by so-called conspiracy theories, which can be identified by the discursive motto of nothing is real, everything is connected… We will argue that conspiracy theories, as a paranoid narration of the contingency, equate discourse of the first cause, i.e. metaphysical principle. This type of discourse operates on the premise that reproduction of the existing order somehow results in the working of a conspiracy, the subject of which is usually some kind of power elite. The conspiracy theory has a long history. It partly parallels liberal techniques of transparency, an early promise of a political-journalistic pact. In this sense, conspiracy and transparency are two contradictory ways of resolving politics, two different technologies of power. A revolution, for example, has always been a conspiracy against existing power structures. But we must not simply equate conspiracy, i.e. a political strategy, with conspiracy theory, insofar as some degree of theory of conspiracy is needed to claim conspiracy as a political strategy (for example, structural conspiracy

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of capital against labour power). Instead, we will take conspiracy theories as a form of a specific regime of truth, vaguely called post-truth. If the phenomenon of post-truth (perhaps we could even say para-truth) has any socio-political meaning (and it does), then we ought to be able to demonstrate that nowadays it has become dominant—or in simpler terms, it has started to occupy the mainstream, contrary to its previous countercultural status. Flat Earth Theory, for example, is not just gaining a surprisingly large number of supporters; it is also a conspiracy theory, operating purely on the level of basic physical facts. In terms of digital mediation, one of its fundamental characteristic is the subsumption of the ideological struggle by facts and information. Yet, this is nothing new. Frederic Jameson has already noted that a conspiracy theory is the “poor person’s cognitive mapping in the postmodern age, a degraded figure of the total logic of late capital” (Jameson 1988, p. 356). A cognitive mapping of the structure of a conspiracy theory is a form of representation, concealing the impossibility of understanding the historical logic of capital, or as Toscano and Kinkle put it, the absolute (Toscano and Kinkle 2015). Here, we are basically evoking the correlationist dispositif, as we have demonstrated that representation presupposes correlationist mediation of the real, which is based on the impossibility of thinking of the real as absolute. In this sense, we must remember that for Jameson or Galloway, the absolute is always already the historical logic of capital. Yet, here we are deep in the simulation. So far, we have been operating with two theses: the first claims that the absolute is becoming numerical, whereas the other states, according to Galloway, that the computer as numerical form of mediation is simulating metaphysics. Let’s proceed with Galloway’s line of argumentation: “Ideology, which was traditionally defined as an ‘imaginary relationship to real conditions’ (Althusser), has in some senses succeeded too well and, as it were, put itself out of a job. Instead, we have simulation, which must be understood as something like an ‘imaginary relationship to ideological conditions.’ In short, ideology gets modelled in software. So, in the very perfection of the ideological regime, in the form of its pure digital simulation, comes the death of the ideological regime, and the simulation is ‘crowned winner’ as the absolute horizon of the ideological world. The computer is the ultimate ethical machine. It has no actual relation with ideology in any proper sense of the term, only a virtual relation” (Galloway 2012, p. 62). We could say that simulation is a mode of relation to the

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(imaginary) relation of the real. At a machine or computational level, a simulation functions as an ideology. Here Galloway deals with the interface as a representational form of digital mediation. According to Galloway, the interface is the effect, operating between cultural form (aesthetical) and historical material context (political). Based on such a general claim, which of course is much more complicated, Galloway proposes four different types of signification, participating on the continuum between coherence and incoherence (ibid., p. 46). The first is called ideological, based on aesthetics of coherence and politics of coherence; the second, the ethical, is a mixture of the aesthetics of incoherence and the politics of coherence; the third, the poetic, is based on the aesthetics of coherence and the politics of incoherence; and finally, the fourth, is a mixture of the aesthetics of incoherence and a politics of incoherence. Consequently, if a computer is ethical, then it marks a shift from ideology to ethics and, we must add, to poetics. The world today is oscillating between ethical and poetical regimes of signification, as a representational regime of digital mediation. This of course does not mean that the world is becoming more moral (good) and more expressive (varied), but simply—in a Laruellian way—more metaphysical. However, metaphysical structure also has its epistemic (the principle that everything could be computable) and political conditions (cybernetic-liberal governmentality or ethos). To extend and reuse Galloway’s typification, we can return to conspiracy theories (as a general form of post-truth). We could say that conspiracy theories are ethical regimes of signification. They are based on a representation of coherence (imitating the discourse of investigative journalism, histography, logic, and witnessing) and at the same time on the politics of incoherence (the political stance can easily switch from one side to another side of the political spectrum). Going further with our analysis, it can be claimed that practices of fake news are poetical, as they are based on a representation of incoherence (intentionally mocking mass media journalistic discourses or unintentionally disclosing contradictions) and the politics of coherence (a fixed stance against mass media modes of representation and against political option). If conspiracy theories or fake news slip into an incoherence mode of both, representation and politics, perhaps they could start to get on the secret, as a step towards practical understanding of truth beyond its deconstruction. Of course, we are talking schematically here, but this is one way of approaching the aesthetic regime of today’s mode of digital conjuncture.

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Final Remarks: Post-truth, Fascism, Neoliberalism and Digital Flâneur To address the phenomenon of post-truth, this text has contextualized post-truth in relation to a new aestheticized regime. However, before defining this new regime, we have delineated its epistemic conditions by thematizing correlationism as the fundamental modern Western epistemic dispositif and discussing mediation through the prism of two major theories of communication, Stuart Hall’s cultural and C. E. Shannon’s mathematical model of communication. We have then proceeded with an analysis of political conditions, focusing on “mathematics of liberalism”, only to finish with Laruelle’s theory of non-mediation as a much needed perspective on truth beyond mediation and Beller’s analysis of the convergence between capitalism, digitalization and racism, evoking metaphysics as specific register of knowledge and politics, which on the one hand underpins the Western matrix of knowledge, whereas on the other, it actively engages in the politics of everyday life by delivering narrations on what it means to be human. If a non-philosophy is “a thought according to real experience” (Laruelle 2017, p. 5), then it means, not to go into details in Laruelle’s own non-humanistic theory of the human, that philosophical decision and humanism in particular “never think the lived identity of a human being, instead attempting to think the human in relation to some transcendental attribute that erases that lived reality” (Smith 2016, p. 10). However, this is precisely the point: post-truth indicates a new type of aesthetization of the contemporaneity of the current neoliberal regime. But how is the current neoliberal formation different from the neoliberal formation preceding the 2007–2010 crisis? The main difference certainly lies in the optimization of capitalist accumulation attained by normalizing financialization and further consolidating neoliberal governmentality on the one hand, but also in the emergence of a strange merger of neoliberal ideology intertwined with fascist tendencies, intensified by media technologized mediation. Whether manifested as a specific socio-political and economical form or a power dispositif, fascism as a distinctive manifestation of anthropogenesis is immanently tied to alienation and aesthetization; yet, following Susan Buck-Morss, we ought to assume that both outlive fascism as sensual conditions of modernity (Buck-Morss 1992, p. 4). Drawing on Walter Benjamin, Susan Buck-Morss claims, that sensory alienation is not created but only managed by fascism, exposing its trans-historic character. The phenomenon

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of post-truth therefore needs to be conceptualized within the context of the new aestheticized regime of politics, which cannot be understood separately from fascism. Susan Buck-Morss’s remark on fascism’s role in the management of alienation also urges us to ask ourselves about the kind of relationship between this new aestheticized regime of politics and the current neoliberal conjuncture we are dealing with, where notions of posttruth and fake news should be seen as the direct aftermath of the dramatic events of 2008. According to Joseph Vogl (2014, pp. 125–155), the latter revealed a crisis of the whole capitalist system, unleashing a series of events, like the Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement, the Greek government-debt crisis and, finally, the election of Donald Trump. If the standardization of financialized capitalization has accelerated the capitalist mode of production by establishing an economy of debt as the central mechanism of contemporary capitalization, where, according to Marina Vishmidt (2009, pp. 5–7), labour has been de-valued and revalorised as debt, neoliberal governmentality, which Jason Read (2009) describes as a “manner, or a mentality, in which people are governed and govern themselves” (p. 29), provides a distinct platform for this new conjuncture of reset neoliberalism. In fact, as Jason Read puts it, “neoliberalism operates on interests, desires, and aspirations rather than through rights and obligations, […] neoliberal governmentality […] follows a general trajectory of intensification” (Read 2009, p. 29). Precisely because neoliberalism does not target the body directly, even avoiding so-called disciplinary power as it acts on the conditions of actions, its power, according to Jason Read (ibid.), is even more intense, saturating the field of actions, and possible actions, creating a unique paradox of how power is administered. In regard to the phenomenon of post-truth, it can therefore be claimed that it is exactly this paradox that fuels the use of discourses of post-truth and fake news; even more, it seems that they are a curious product of neoliberalism, of its non-classical disciplinarian power of the sovereign on one the hand, and its utilitarian legacy of liberalism’s notions of economic and political freedom on the other, manifesting in the distinct subjectivity of reset neoliberalism, which contains all the features of its pre-crisis characteristics, though in their optimized version, optimized by financialization, communicative capitalism, and the dispositif of digitalization, for which “user-friendly” computer interfaces are essential. According to Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, these form “productive individuals”. These individuals, says Chun, are key in “creating “informed” individuals who can overcome the

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chaos of global capitalism by mapping their relation to the totality of the global capitalist system” (Chun 2011, p. 8). What Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is saying, is basically a phantasm of neoliberal communicative capitalism, which, at least in the case of the posttruth and fake news phenomena, manifests itself in a supposedly “enlightened”, autonomous subjectivity, who thinks it revolts neoliberal conjecture of never-ending state of emergency. In this vein, we are faced with an oxymoron: if neoliberal governmentality in essence cannot act without constantly proclaiming a freed subjectivity, which of course is far from being alienated from itself, alienation on the other hand is a constitutive feature of modernity. This is the reason why bother with Laruelle’s non-philosophy. As we have tried to show together with Laruelle’s theory, alienation is based on mediation of the real. Of course, this is an old philosophical point, which in the twentieth century became a foundation for the anti-alienated passion for the real—machinic in essence—as Badiou would have it (Badiou 2007). Laruelle, however, as it is totally clear, does not argue for another form of the passion of the real, he does not argue against alienation, but instead for the thinking mode beyond anti-alienated passion of the real. According to Laurel Harris (2003), Susan Buck-Morss, examining Walter Benjamin, shows that the concept of “aesthetics” is actually anaesthetics, a sensory negotiation of overwhelming stimulation and the defensive mechanism of numbness in the modern environment, accompanied by a fragmented subjectivity. The latter, in its desire to get rid of its alienation, attempts to produce illusion of wholeness, a kind of “phantasmagoria” (ibid.), which, again with Laruelle, is onto-photo-logical. And if the “phantasmagoria” is the all-encompassing World-Media System that shapes lived perception and experience, it can be regarded as a mass, mediated cognitive illusion, urging us to rethink the status of the real itself within digitalized meditation. After all, in relation to the new aestheticized regime, and by paraphrasing Benjamin and Deleuze, post-truth is perhaps best encapsulated by something which we will call a “digital flâneur”—a self-centered, all-knowing subjectivity, incessantly floating in its phantasmagoric autistic imaginarium, pushing itself into the abyss of fascism, yet not being aware that the abyss is already starring back, clearly resonating a new conjuncture of global neoliberal capitalism.

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References Agamben, G. (2003). The Open: Man and Animal. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Althusser, L. (2001). Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York and London: Monthly Review Press. Badiou, A. (2007). The Century. Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press. Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Beller, J. (2017). The Message Is Murder: Substrates of Computational Capital. London: Pluto Press. Benjamin, W. (1969). Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. New York: Schocken Books. Bennett, T. (2016). The Stuart Hall Conjuncture. Cultural Studies Review, 22, 282–286. Buck-Morss, S. (1992). Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered. October, 62, 3– 41. Chun, W. H. K. (2011). Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. London and Cambridge: MIT Press. Ernst, W. (2016). Chronopoetics: The Temporal Being and Operativity of Technological Media. London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Foucault, M. (2002). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London and New York: Routledge. Foucault, M. (2003). Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France: 1976–77. New York: Picador. Foucault, M. (2009). Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France: 1977–78. New York: Picador. Galloway, A. R. (2012). The Interface Effect. Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press. Galloway, A. R. (2013). The Poverty of Philosophy: Realism and Post-fordism. Critical Inquiry, 2, 347–366. Galloway, A. R. (2014). Laruelle: Against the Digital. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Greve, J. (2017). The Decisional Apparatus: Jameson, Flusser, Laruelle. In R. Gangle & J. Greve (Eds.), Superpositions: Laruelle and the Humanities. London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Gržini´c, M. (2003). Estetika kibersveta in uˇcinki derealizacije. Ljubljana: Založba ZRC. Hall, S. (1991). Encoding/Decoding. In S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe, & P. Willis (Eds.), Culture, Media, Language: Working Paper in Cultural Studies 1972–1979 (pp. 128– 138). London and New York: Routledge. Harris, L. (2003). Buck-Morss, Susan. Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered. October, 62(Fall 1992), 3– 41. Annotation by L. Harris. Accessed 15 July 2018.

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Jameson, F. (1988). Cognitive Mapping. In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (pp. 347–360). Ithaca: University of Illinois Press. Kittler, F. (1997). Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays. Amsterdam: G + B Arts International. Kittler, F. (1999). Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kolozova, K. (2015). Toward a Radical Metaphysics of Socialism: Marx and Laruelle. Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books. Lahoud, A. (2015). Error Correction: Chilean Cybernetics and Chicago’s Economists. In M. Pasquinelly (Ed.), Alleys of Your Mind: Augmented Intelligence and Its Traumas (pp. 32–55). Lüneberg: Meson Press. Laruelle, F. (2010). The Truth According to Hermes: Theorems on the Secret and Communication. Parrhesia, 9, 18–22. Laruelle, F. (2011). The Concept of Non-photography. Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic, Sequence Press. Laruelle, F. (2017). Principles of Non-philosophy. London and New York: Bloomsbury Publishing. Lovink, G. (2011). Networks Without a Cause: A Critique of Social Media. Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press. Meillassoux, Q. (2008). After the Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. London and New York: Continuum. Meillassoux, Q. (2011). Potentiality and Virtuality. In L. Bryant, N. Srnicek, & G. Harman (Eds.), The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (pp. 224–236). Prahran: re.press. Mullarkey, J., & Smith, P. A. (2012). Introduction: The Non-philosophical Inversion: Laruelle’s Knowledge Without Domination. In J. Mullarkey & A. P. Smith (Eds.), Laruelle and Non-philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Read, J. (2009). A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity. Foucault Studies, 6, 25–36. Shannon, C. E., & Weaver, W. (1964). The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Smith, P. A. (2016). François Laruelle’s Principles of Non-philosophy: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Srnicek, N. (2017). Platform Capitalism. Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press. Thi Nguyen, M. (2012). The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages. Durham: Duke University Press. Toscano, A., & Kinkle, J. (2015). Cartographies of the Absolute. Winchester and Washington, DC: Zero Books. Vishmidt, M. (2009). Value at Risk: From Politics of Reproduction to Human Capital. Reartikulacija, 7, 4–5. Vogl, J. (2014). The Sovereignty Effect: Markets and Power in the Economic Regime. Qui Parle, 23(1), 125–155.

PART II

Crisis

CHAPTER 6

The Reveal of the Real: Fact-Checking and ‘Not-Tags’ in the Current Conjuncture Rosemary Overell

Introduction In preparation for this chapter, I re-read many of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies’ (hereafter CCCS) Working Papers on conjunctural analysis in the 1970s and 1980s. There is such energy in the words Stuart Hall and his comrades mimeographed and later collated for Hutchinson, and Macmillan (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies 1978; Hall and Jefferson 1975; Hall 1978; Hall et al. 1980). The CCCS project was one of praxis, and through Gramsci’s notion of conjuncture a whole way of thinking through how we do academic work was put in motion. The ‘inter-disciplinarity’ of Cultural Studies is, now, perhaps a cliché. But the momentum of CCCS lay in the openness of its practitioners to use whatever critical tools were needed to tackle the particularities of the time and place where they wrote. In Samuels’ edited collection from the History Workshop, Hall writes in his ‘defence’ of theory, that Cultural Studies thinkers must not only respond to their context (1981a, p. 381), but also be able

R. Overell (B) University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 R. Overell and B. Nicholls (eds.), Post-Truth and the Mediation of Reality, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25670-8_6

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to draw abstractions (without recourse to the vulgar ‘types’ of Weberian sociology) (p. 382). After all, he writes, ‘chemists have their reagents and botanists have their microscopes’ (ibid.); so too did the academics at the Centre have ‘theory’—Althusserian Marxism—which, along with Gramscian approaches, elucidated their analyses of popular culture as a site for the diagnosis of, and intervention in, hegemony as a lived, and experienced, ‘social whole’ of ideology (Althusser 2012 [1971]). In this chapter I posit a provocation which proposes a different ‘reagent’ or ‘microscope’ for contemporary Cultural Studies. I want to push off, and out of, what has been dubbed by some as a ‘bleak’ (Bérubé 2009) and ‘worrying’ moment (Turner 2011, p. 36) in Cultural Studies and respond to the current conjuncture with what might be seen as a heretical move. I stake a claim for Lacanian psychoanalysis. I propose that Lacan’s understanding of the ‘Real’ grants a useful pivot from which to generate critique of contemporary culture. Lacanian approaches are not anomalous to Cultural Studies; Althusser and, then Laclau and Mouffe (2014 [1985]), drew on psychoanalysis and were (and remain) influential in the field. Further, in ‘North American Cultural Studies’—that of comparative literature, cinema studies and visual arts departments—the psychoanalysis of thinkers like Mulvey (1975) and Copjec (1994) often forms the basis of critique.1 Žižek, too, has had his ‘moments’ in the Cultural Studies canon and, indeed, will feature in my account below.2 But to draw together Hall’s work, or what might be called ‘British Cultural Studies’ on conjunctural analysis with Lacan offers some novel but, more importantly, useful tools for tracking the current context.3

1 Turner (2002 [1990], 2011) elaborates on the intersections, and tensions, between Mulvey-influenced cinema studies and Cultural Studies. 2 Žižek is a curious figure in Cultural Studies and has often functioned in a kind of ‘parallax’. It is surprising how little he is cited and engaged, especially considering his engagement with matters of ideology and, indeed, popular culture (particularly cinema). Paul Bowman (2006) presents an interesting discussion of Žižek and Cultural Studies, noting that Žižek himself regularly dismisses ‘Cultural Studies’. 3 Turner’s (2002 [1990]) well-cited text British Cultural Studies presents a similar distinction, as does his later book What’s Become of Cultural Studies? (2011). In the latter, Turner responds to Bérubé’s jeremiad to Cultural Studies, by pointing out that, in North America, the sociologically inclined, Gramscian influenced Cultural Studies, associated with the CCCS indeed has had relatively little impact. This, as Turner points out, does not mean that Cultural Studies has ‘failed’, however, considering its influence in other places (the U.K., Asia and Australia, for example). Hall himself draws such a distinction between British and American

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I suggest that, particularly in popular media, we see a vaunting of the signifier and leveraging of a politics of the ‘reveal’ of the ‘actual’ significance of media texts, as opposed to their ideological meaning, as crucial to critical analysis. This approach, which I argue is implicitly influenced by the take up of Althusser in British Cultural Studies, is valuable. In this paper, I consider the limitations of this reveal-of-the-real. I argue that the binarised logic of the ‘reveal’ hinges on an understanding of ideology anchored in a consideration of signification as a mischievous ‘masking’ of ‘actual’ conditions. This approach, I suggest, to ideology needs to be nuanced through an account of the Lacanian psychoanalytic Real—showing popular media representations as more than simply the devious machinations of ‘false consciousness’ demanding an illumination of ‘things as they really are’. My grappling with the Real works through a discussion of psychoanalytic approaches to negation (via Žižek and Zupanˇciˇc) which, I think, go some way towards accounting for the recent rise of reactionary politics. I focus on two popular media locations to demonstrate the intersection of the Real and ideology. Firstly, I look at fact-checking news websites as indicative of the ‘reveal-of-the-real’ approach and demonstrate the limitations of this for public critique and as a counter to hegemonic ideology. Secondly, I look at the ascent of a particular hashtag (#) on twitter: what I call the ‘not-tag’—hashtags which begin with a disavowal of ‘#not…’. I focus on the still-trending not-tag #NotMyPresident. This tag went viral after the election of Donald Trump in 2016, and continues to circulate three years later. #NotMyPresident purports to designate the apparent ‘fakery’ (or ‘not-realness’) of Trump in a mode intended to reveal his buffoonery but, more importantly, his lack of sovereignty. I suggest that this not-tag implies the existence of some real-as-actual behind the reveal of the ‘Fake President’. I contend that the reveal logic used by both fact-checking journalism and not-tags depends on a binarised understanding of ideology as an Imaginary, expressed in the Symbolic (generally in media representations), which covers over ‘real relations’. This chapter is intended as a location and a provocation, swivelling off from the current preoccupation with the ‘real’ in popular discourse. It is not an exhaustive account of the intersections between

approaches in his essay ‘The Rediscovery of “ideology”: The return of the repressed in media studies’ in 1982.

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psychoanalysis and Cultural Studies; nor is it a comprehensive summary of contemporary journalism hashtags or right-wing politics. Rather, I present an engagement with the ‘reagent’ of psychoanalysis and Cultural Studies that presents a brief case-study in service of a broader, and (in my work at least) ongoing provocation to Cultural Studies.

Conjunctural Contexts The understanding of ideology as a kind of idealist ‘veil’ simply covering over how things ‘really’, materially, are persists in contemporary popular public debate and culture. Though the word ‘ideology’ is rarely used, popular media is replete with references to revealing the truth ‘behind the spin’ of politicians, journalists and celebrities. Academics, too, join in the fray— providing expert opinion and ‘cut through’ in popular news and ‘Explainer’ articles. The currency of the ‘reveal’ responds to the frantic tenor of popular culture characteristic of the current conjuncture, particularly on social media. Pundits—journalists, academics and commentators—frequently, and often spectacularly, rely on the communication of ‘facts’ as a salve for the apparently preposterous claims of TV-stars-cum-Presidents, rapists turned judges and the like. These are what is colloquially hashtagged as #receipts; bits and pieces of information—leaked documents; hidden emails; sexts and tax invoices—intended to (if you’ll forgive me) trump the fakery at play in official political institutions, such as the White House, or cultural institutions such as Hollywood.4 Specifically, the current conjuncture is characterised by the ascent of Trump, the bombast of Brexit, and the ongoing rejection of climate change. This moment brings with it an outrage that seems to demand a swift response. There’s a kind of frenzied gathering together of something to ‘clapback’ at the Trumps, Johnsons and Petersons lest they take hold. Progressive journalistic considerations of these machinations of late-capitalist conservatism agree that such outrages are an affront to how things ‘really’ are; thus, requiring various forms of ‘fact-checking’. Academia, too is not immune to the reveal-of-the-real solution. A topical example, is the compulsion many of us working in cultural (and media) studies have felt to take 4 The recourse to ‘receipts’ in popular discourse riffs from African-American vernacular— looped and mediatised through reality television programmes such as the Real Housewives of …, as well as hip-hop music, most famously in Princess Nokia’s 2017 track ‘Receipts’.

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up and disseminate ‘media literacy’; an often crude pedagogy which hinges on the assumption that ‘fake news’ can be designated through various textual markers and then the ‘real’ truth, or word or meaning, can simply be revealed underneath.5 This quick (though I hope not too frenzied) foray into contemporary cultural contexts should indicate the dualised relation at play here: the real truth is scrambled towards, tagged, opined over and divulged as a kind of fortification against the posturing of those in power in the West. These figures—who Berlant (2018) has dubbed ‘Big Men’—are posturing and regarded as imposters. Complicating these appeals to—and reveals of—the real is, of course, these Men’s own uptake of the language of the ‘real’. ‘Fake news’, after all, was a phrase disseminated by Trump himself—working to designate disagreeable content as false, but implying his own words, his official press releases and so forth are, thus, real. All these arbitrations of the real—as actual—would, following both Althusser and Hall, work as examples of ideology—hinging as they do on appeals to a ‘rational’ ‘obviousness’ that obscures structural contingencies. That there is ideology at play in Trump’s appeals to ‘Make America Great Again’; the U.K. Independence Party’s nostalgia for an Anglophilic Britain; and, Peterson’s denunciations of ‘cultural Marxism’—is perhaps, well, obvious to Cultural Studies practitioners. Nonetheless, to fight these monolithic appeals to ‘how things truly are’ with a kind of magic trick that shakes the scales from the eyes of MAGA-hat wearing ‘deplorables’ has been shown as ineffective for destabilising such reactionary forces. The successes of Brexit and Trump clearly bear this out, as does the election of conservative leaders such as Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Viktor Orban in Hungary. Further, the reliance on the reveal-of-the-real is also, I believe, critically anaemic. The focus on the word, on language and the figure (President, Prime Minister or otherwise)—as either/or—real or fake—is limited and does little to elucidate the bits which exceed the somethings around which subjects cohere and hegemony arises. To draw on an ‘outpost’ example, in the recent Australian election, the corruption of the conservative (Liberal-National Party) incumbents was covered and circulated in mainstream and ‘social’ media.

5 The purposes of this article are not to moralise on ‘media literacy’ approaches, just to note that such projects are growing (a cursory search of recent government funded grants in Australia and New Zealand demonstrates this) and that the approach hinges on the ‘revealof-real’ logic. For a critique of the, indeed, ideological problems of media literacy see Druick (2016) and Wallis and Buckingham (2016).

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So thoroughly visible was the Party’s cronyism many LNP members presumed they would lose.6 Nonetheless the Party were re-elected, with an increased margin. All this despite, numerous ‘fact-checking’ widgets disseminated—and used—on popular online media fronts. As I will draw out below, Althusser’s work—in the present chapter, primarily read with, and through, Hall—grants us the beginnings of a way of tackling these contradictions conjuncturally. I want to push Althusser’s psychoanalytic inclinations more, however. Althusser has experienced a serious revival in political philosophy of late, including Lacanian readings of political theory7 but a fusing of Althusser and Lacan with a view to popular culture—as a means for working conjuncturally—I venture, is less visible in Cultural Studies. I use psychoanalysis in the spirit of a conjunctural approach which draws on critical tools suitable for the moment. I have already summarised the current popular, and academic, concern with ‘the real’. Mostly, this preoccupation, however collapses the ‘real’ with the ‘actual’, and the ‘truthful’. So harried are we in responding to the obscenities arising from Trump and his ilk that we have slipped into a similarly ideological terrain, with the vaunting of real ‘facts’ and ‘data’ as a primary means of counter-attack. Rather, here, and further staking my claim for psychoanalysis—I want to take this idea of the ‘real’ and look at it askance. I want to take it as Lacan defined it, as Real—that modality which exceeds the binarised ‘presence/absence’ of the Imaginary and the Symbolic. That is, the Real as the third order in Lacan’s Borromean Knot which is apparently inassimilable (without the cut of the Symbolic), but also underpins the materialisations requisite of signification in the Symbolic and Imaginary (Evans 1996, pp. 162–163). This materiality, Lacan discusses in Seminar VII (Ethics of Psychoanalysis) (1997 [1959–1960]) is extimate—both intimately experienced and externally contingent. Further, materiality here is premised on negation; the puzzling proposition which Freud (1975 [1925]) discusses as Verneinung —where the subject’s articulation of, and insistence on, the ‘not’ of a particular object, far from rendering the thing invisible, brings it to the

6 The win was widely dubbed a “miracle” in the press—an indication of the unlikeliness of the LNP victory, but also a reference to the incumbent PM Scott Morrison’s fundamentalist Christian beliefs (see Belot 2019; Hasham 2019; Panahi 2019). 7 See Stavrakakis’ (2019) recent edited collection, particularly Homer’s chapter on the ‘Lacanian Left’ and Tomšic’s entry on ‘Capitalism’.

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fore, paradoxically by its pronounced disavowal and repression. This insistence on the paradoxical materiality of the Real is crucial for an analysis building on Althusser’s insistence that ideology matters.8 This accounts for the manner in which ideology works through the knotted necessity of the ‘with-without’ of negation—not simply as a contradictory ‘presence/absence’—but as contingent on, and constitutive of the Real as that which is experienced as lost, cut off and absent; what Lacan calls the objet petit a. This is a curious site of absence which—in the subject’s perception of it as always-already lost—paradoxically also generates something in that absence which, I suggest, works ideologically. The following section summarises Hall’s conjunctural approach, emphasising the complementary influence of Althusserian psychoanalysis. Where the complement arises is in ideology. To bring the Real into focus, we must understand ideology as more than the imperatives laid forth in language (or the Symbolic) and in the Imaginary. Althusser’s contribution is his discussion of the Imaginary topography of ideology. Writing contemporaneously with Lacan’s ‘later’ lectures where the (Borromean) ‘knotted’, material, Real was coming to the fore, it is likely that this particular (Lacanian) Real here was relatively unknown to Althusser.9 I propose that the Real, particularly as a response to the current conjuncture’s preoccupying designation with the real and the ‘not’ real (the fake), must be underlined. My swerve towards popular culture in the discussion of fact-checking journalism and the not-tag #NotMyPresident is just as imperative to my chapter as my forays into post-war critical theory. With the posthumous revival of Stuart Hall’s work in mind, it is worth reiterating his insistence that popular culture is ‘where hegemony arises’ (1981b, p. 239). Further still, his admonition of those who simply celebrate or designate the aesthetics of the popular remains, I believe, current. Popular culture, as the ‘arena’ of hegemonic struggle is the reason it matters, ‘Otherwise’, he writes, ‘I don’t give a damn about it’ (p. 239). I completely concur.

8 As Althusser emphasises, “Ideology has a material existence” (p. 258), noting that what appears immaterial or simply ‘ideas’ as ‘ideals’ materialise through their relation to the ISAs and RSAs as well as through everyday practice (p. 259). 9 Writes Balibar in the Foreword to the revised edition of Althusser’s work: “Althusser very unceremoniously pulls the Lacanian symbolic back into the field of the imaginary and the speculary relation characteristic of it, in order to make it a ‘function’ internal to the imaginary. … All indications would seem to be that Althusser refuses to identify the ‘real’, as Lacan does (xvii).

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Cultural Studies and Gramsci To stake a claim for psychoanalysis in the current conjuncture I unpick, and unpack the contexts through which Cultural Studies—and Hall’s Cultural Studies endeavours particularly—encountered psychoanalysis, primarily through Althusser. I locate these encounters as a pivoting off Gramsci’s influential work on hegemony, and, with the collection’s theme in mind, his notion of conjuncture. I repeat, this is not an exhaustive account of either Gramscian or Althusserian informed Cultural Studies. Rather, this is a consideration which will, I hope, demonstrate the necessity of a psychoanalytic approach. Gramsci’s impetus resounded with the concerns of the Centre: why does class consciousness fail to take hold, despite the apparent ripeness of ‘conditions’? Gramsci’s retooling of Marxism in the wake of Fascism through the novel space of hegemony provides a language for understanding the limitations of Marxist-Leninism. In particular (again, as is well-rehearsed) his attention to the more-than economic determinants—particularly the ‘cultural’—remains Gramsci’s key contribution to Cultural Studies. The role of culture—the press; narratives of national and regional identity and so on—as the arena for the (re)production of consent is crucial for understanding how ‘the subaltern’ apparently agrees with dominant culture in spite of their economic interests. As Gramsci notes, this ‘in spite of’ can be explained through the complexity of hegemonic space. Instead of a simple base-superstructure topography where exploitative conditions are forcefully imposed on the masses by the ruling class—Gramsci presents hegemonic space as contingent and ambivalent and, most importantly, working as a site of a kind of ‘give and take’. All subjects—even the exploited—are granted something in hegemonic space (though some—the bourgeoisie— are certainly granted more than others). In Mussolini’s Italy the workingclass and peasant consent to Fascist ideology also granted a sense of national coherence and belonging—all this in spite of Fascism’s pandering to the ruling, bourgeois, class. According to Gramsci, hegemony is a shifting field in which ideology plays out—is processed, disseminated and (re)produced. Requisite to this field is a consenting subject who not only goes along with, but absorbs and materialises, or even embodies, ideology in hegemonic space. To locate a conjuncture is a naming of this space. As Hall writes in some of his last work, a conjuncture is a means for grappling with ‘a period

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during which the different social, political, economic and ideological contradictions that are at work in society come together to give it a specific and distinctive shape’ (2010, p. 57). So, we have a Fascist conjuncture; a Thatcherist conjuncture etcetera. In this late work, Hall—with Doreen Massey—discuss the post-New Labour juggernaut of resurgent Tory-ism in the U.K. as presenting a particular conjuncture of ‘financialisation’, resonating and resounding, with global austerity after the Global Financial Crisis (p. 67). Naming, though, is, to use a trope to which I will return … #complicated. Hall, hearkening back to the Working Papers , reminds us that designating a conjuncture is a particular political move within Cultural Studies. That is, it works to position, focus and detail how ‘different levels of expression—political, ideological, cultural and economic’ are ‘deployed’ hegemonically (p. 65). Nonetheless, Hall—with Massey—also remind us that naming can never fully account for the machinations of hegemony. There is always something ‘unspeakable’ (p. 61) when we try to critique a conjuncture through naming, remarks Hall. Perhaps this left-over bit—that bit which is not able to be spoken—assures the popularly lived experience of a common-sense acceptance of ‘the way things are’. Common-sense is, of course ideological. And what Hall is gesturing towards here is that ideology moves us —not only through what is speakable or nameable—but also through that something more. Hall and Massey parse this as a double movement. Like Gramsci they wonder at how the subject—the hegemonic subject—comes to be. They consider the movement between the subject (imagined as singular, unique, even entrepreneurial in the financialised conjuncture they discuss) and the collective—whether ‘we Britons’; ‘Europeans’; ‘Americans’ or whatever shared signifier is vaunted, within the hegemonic arena at a particular moment. This double movement of ideology ensuring hegemony—the toggling between the individual subject and their position as part of that shared signification–merits an analysis of ‘expression’ (p. 65), or representation, as Hall notes. But it also requires some accounting for that unspeakable bit. The push that moves us –in both senses: it ‘shuffles’10 us from the individual to the shared; but also generates a kind of investment that is not quite nameable.

10 Another of Hall’s later articles on this matter is aptly titled: ‘New Labour’s Double Shuffle’ (2005).

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Cultural Studies and Althusser Not quite nameable … But we Cultural Studies cognoscenti know the next, well: move. Surely Althusser provides us with an explanation for all the moving (again in both senses of the word) parts of ideology. Althusser, after all, attends to the Imaginary element of ideology. That is, that ideology works very well indeed, provided the Symbolic structures to which it appeals are underpinned by an Imaginary relation that is, well, relatable, for the subject: the individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he shall submit freely to the commandments of the Subject, i.e. in order that he shall (freely) accept his subjection. (p. 269)

This is what made Althusser so useful to Cultural Studies. His account of ideology, like Gramsci’s, pushed beyond vulgar Marxist-Leninism to consider this ‘double’ subject. Unlike Gramsci, however, Althusser drew on psychoanalysis to present his approach.11 He parries with the subject of both the Symbolic (language and the signifier) and the Imaginary (of signification and the signified). This is the double subject who necessarily becomes one; the Symbolic and the Imaginary, after all cannot be separated. This is the subject who, at least experiences, is interpellated by, and identifies with something more than a collective, classed, identity. This is the one who sees him- or herself as individually, ‘freely’, moved by and towards hegemonic ‘commandments’. Writes Hall in the Working Papers on Ideology; Althusser’s subject is one who ‘in the first place recognise[s] oneself as a “free subjectivity”’ (1978, p. 9), despite the mandate to take up one’s place in the broader hegemonic ‘ideological apparatus’. The double subject moves. It works. And, surely, even in Hall’s later work, when Althusser was arguably unfashionable (after Althusser’s institutionalisation, and with the ascent of cultural policy studies; fan studies; Actor-Network-Theory and other such things, which would require another chapter, in another volume), we see the implicit usefulness of Althusser’s understanding of the subject for Hall in his explanation of the financialised conjuncture as a site where:

11 Though, as highlighted above, I am unable to detail their approach in the current chapter, Laclau and Mouffe are the obvious thinkers to have considered Gramscian understandings of hegemony with/and psychoanalysis.

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the language of class … seems no longer applicable … not because class is unimportant or has disappeared, or because the class structure hasn’t changed … [but because] people aren’t aware that they’re speaking ideology … The ideology has become ‘naturalised’, simply part of nature. (2010, pp. 63–64)

Here, Hall doubtless draws on Althusser’s discussion of how ideology functions through a ‘very special kind of obviousness’ (p. 240) which appears so natural that it seems to be beyond criticism. Althusser’s subject, like Lacan’s, was not humanist; his was not the humble proletariat carrying out the inevitable revolution. Fundamental to Althusser’s anti-humanist approach was his complication of ‘nature’. When discussions of class seem ‘inapplicable’—when dominant ideology appears natural is when, according to Althusser—it becomes clear that ideology is inescapable. Ideology is not some immoral overlay on some better-natured subject. Rather—like hegemony—it is a state of play which remains crucial, no matter the conjuncture. What matters is how ideology is deployed—to whose ends, and to what effects, does it work? Althusser’s essay—grim though it may be to more ‘traditional’ Marxists—accounts for the disappointments of twentieth-century revolutions which were premised on dismantling of the signifiers of bourgeois ideology. Hall, addresses Althusser’s approach in his ‘Defence of Theory’ noting that the ISAs essay provides a necessary affront to the ‘naïve humanism’ (p. 381) of much post-war Anglophone Marxism. In the same ‘Defence’, Hall concurs with Althusser’s push against the appeals to the apparently authentic ‘experience’ of the working-class of humanist Marxism. For Hall that thing that moves the working-class—their experiences—is not simply demonstrative of ‘true’ (and ‘correct’) class consciousness, or a ‘false’ (‘not true’, and implicitly ‘wrong’) ideological consciousness. Rather, he notes that Althusser’s key contribution to Cultural Studies was that the lived experiences of conjunctural subjects must be ‘interrogated for its complex interweaving of real and ideological elements’ (p. 383). Again, we see a doubling—complex and interwoven, yes—but a movement between the real (as a kind of ‘actual’) and the ideological. This doubling, manifested in the lived experience of the subject interpellated by ideology, is elaborated by Althusser through the psychoanalytic notion of the order of the Imaginary. This order depends on the relation between the specular image (the Imaginary) and the abstraction of language (the Symbolic). These orders work together—generating the subject’s identification with, in Althusser’s (and later in Hall’s) discussion,

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ideology. For Althusser, ideology is as seductive to the subject as the mirrorimage Lacan discusses in his ‘Mirror Stage’ paper (2007 [1949]). Through the apparent unity of the signifier (the foundation of the Symbolic), the signified and signification (integral to the Imaginary) merge in a fantasy of a seamless wholeness in the ‘glaringly obvious “self-evident truths”’ of the world (Althusser 2012 [1971], p. 69). That is, ideology works through such self-evident relations we take them as real. The real and the ideological (as Hall parses) are not simply interwoven, but are inseparable. Rather than a duality, or even a simple doubling, then, Hall—perhaps unknowingly—gestures towards Lacan’s moebius topology of the Symbolic and the Imaginary. I think this spatial metaphor is quite apt for understanding ideology’s conjunctural specificity. The Imaginary provides us with the perception of ‘common’, and ‘whole’ sense which is simultaneously objectively out there as Symbolic fact (articulated in language, law etcetera) and intimately experienced as lived in here—as interpellating and positioning the subject in relation to others, and things, in such-and-such a way naturally so that, to paraphrase Hall the subject appears ‘unaware’ of, say, class structures. That is; while ideology works through the positioning of particular signifiers (Symbolic) as ‘just-so’, its moebius-like relation to the Imaginary requires a seduction of the subject by the specular promise of identification and wholeness. That ideology is, paradoxically, natural, in the sense that it is inescapable, no matter the conjuncture makes the moebius analogy still more appropriate. The Symbolic and Imaginary are different orders—but they are also intertwined. The stripping away of one to lay bare the other is impossible. Althusser’s approach to ideology, informed as it is by psychoanalysis, gestures towards the ambivalence of the signifier. Unfortunately, though, his work does not so readily employ a moebius topology. Rather (and, understandably, considering when his work was written), Althusser ultimately frames the experience of ideology as one of misrecognition—following Lacan’s early ‘mirror’ paper. Ideology, for Althusser, provides the subject with an experience—imagined, in the psychoanalytic sense—contrary to their actual conditions. This, along with the background hum and threat of the RSAs, maintains ideology’s hold. As Žižek (2014) points out, Althusser presents the orders as separated—though, of course, contingent. What Althusser misses, Žižek argues and, I hope that this chapter might unpack, is that this gap between the orders is immanent —working in a mode of negation which hinges on the Lacanian order of the Real.

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Relating the Real in Popular Culture Much contemporary popular public criticism tackles how ‘the media’ proffers, and produces, ‘real’ stories about the world which work to hide some ‘true story’ behind the representation. Another recent, ‘outpost’ example can be drawn from the spectacular downfall of Australian Rugby Union player, Israel Folau. The player was dumped by the national team after a series of homophobic social media posts. Following this, a number of think-pieces and tweeted conversations arose analysing how popular media representations, focusing on Folau’s Pasifika Christian identity, worked in a manner to privilege white homo-normativity (see Hamad 2019; Thomsen 2019). Such analyses—of how, for example, media contents work discursively, to privilege hegemonic groups (the bourgeoisie; white people; heterosexuals etcetera) and marginalise ‘others’—are valuable. It is worth noting here, that the word ‘ideology’ is less used, however, with variations on ‘power’ more common, demonstrative perhaps of a resistance to ‘state the obvious’ and discuss such things specifically in terms of ideology. This standard type of critique, however, that presumes a kind of ‘laying bare’ of the symbols of ideology does the work of undoing ideology’s function. Not only this, there is an assumption here that the signifier is an overlay—a deception—on top of actual relations. This is tricky because there is a slippage here between the common-sense real proffered by ideological representations (news reports claiming to show ‘how it really is’) and the implied real of actual relations—that is, of the uneven relations essential to (white-; heteropatriarchal-; whatever-) capitalism. The ideological function of the real (as claiming to be actual) should now be apparent. Thus, it is little wonder that Cultural Studies work—concerned with the Gramscian project of the cultivation of hegemonic struggle—regularly pivots off discussions of how popular culture (re)presents ‘reality’. These do not simply function as vulgar reveals —of course. Informed by Althusser, stated or otherwise, ideology here works through an implied focus on the Symbolic and Imaginary orders. That is, they work through a logic of moving between one, and the other, in a double or dualised relation. Symbolic to Imaginary; Symbolic and Imaginary: a ‘double shuffle’ of back and forth. Popular cultural critiques—say, by journalists, the ‘twitterati’ and various public experts—also mobilise this back and forth. In journalism we see this in the burgeoning content around ‘fact-checking’. In this genre of news

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report, we see politicians’ speeches, statements and (yes,—of course!) even Presidential tweets measured in terms of whether they are ‘true’, or not. In another recent example, the New York Times (2019) tackled the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination debates. The article announces that it will show: ‘how the candidates’ remarks stacked up against the truth’ (ibid.). There is an immediate appeal to an oppositional logic where ‘remarks’—the Symbolic signifiers uttered, and the Imaginary significations to which the candidates appeal—is ‘stacked … against the truth’ (ibid.). This article takes the form of the presentation of a statement from candidates followed by the designation of whether the statement is ‘True’ or ‘False’ (in bold). Underneath the classification the New York Times regale the reader with ‘facts’, usually based on statistical studies that ‘prove’ the designation. This recent article is not unusual; it is a standard piece of reportage in the contemporary conjuncture. To return to my ‘outpost’ example, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (2019a), in partnership with a local university (RMIT)12 provides fact-checking in a similar manner, though it finesses the categories of ‘True’ and ‘False’ with a number of colour-coded buzzwords and phrases (‘Doesn’t Stack Up’; ‘In The Ballpark’; ‘Checks Out’; red for not true; green for true). The same recourse to statistics as ‘stackable’ facts follows these categorisations. Ballpark vagaries aside, the red/green coding generates the same duality between the real (and true, fact-full) and the not-real (false and fact-lacking). The site’s ‘About’ page emphasises the dualised, ‘polarised’ topography of facts, and their others: In our impossibly polarised world, facts are now submerged in the mud of fake news, self-serving spin, misinformation and good old-fashioned fearmongering. RMIT ABC Fact Check determines the accuracy of claims by politicians … Fact check is an agenda-free zone; it fearlessly follows the facts no matter where they lead. (Australian Broadcasting Corporation 2019b)

The metaphors of stacking, and submergence, are indicative of the logic of the reveal-of-the-real. To stack up, is to show some material ‘stack’ of ‘fact’. To not stack up is to be submerged in a mire of misinformation— or, it is implied, misrecognition. The purpose of ‘fact-checking’ journalism

12 This partnership is part of a broader media literacy style project “aimed to reduce the levels of deception and confusion” in popular media (Kaszubska 2017) and operates as part of the ABC’s broader ‘Media Literacy’ website (Australian Broadcasting Corporation Education 2018).

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is to recognise and disseminate the real as an ‘actual’ object—a material ‘stack’—submerged, or covered over, the fake. Here again, we see the duo of the actual and the ideological. The former is designated through the Symbolic—the facts and stats (in rather Seussical stacks!)—with the latter functioning as an Imaginary. The ‘spin’ of fantasy is interrupted by, in the ABC case a ‘team’ of checkers, ranked from ‘Chief’ to ‘reporter’—as arbiters of ‘expert opinion and data’ (ibid.). The double bind appears once again. Though there is no reference to ‘ideology’ here, we see the model of an Althusserian misrecognition inferred (though that the ‘checkers’ would be sympathetic to Althusser’s Marxist imperatives is doubtful). To reveal-the-real, materialised in ‘fact’, is to ‘fearlessly’ enlighten readers (ibid.). Nonetheless, the ‘About’ page also demonstrates the ideological function of fact-checking’s appeal to common-sense; that there is some ‘agenda-free zone’ of actual relations simply ‘submerged’ underneath the ‘spin’ is, to paraphrase their own copy impossible. This impossibility though, is not due to a ‘polarising’ duality between the fact as real and not-fact as not-real. Rather, the impossibility of the current conjuncture—of the ascent of, yes, fear-mongerers, alt-right marauders and pussy-grabbing mercenaries—is due to the incapacity of dualised topologies to grapple with the Real. To reduce the real as actual to something that can simply be revealed through the Symbolic as a set of positivised, material, data-sets and facts does not explain the function of ideology as something (to return to Hall) also something unspeakable, something more. This too exceeds the Imaginary—which, again, working as a moebius, relies on the Symbolic for its comprehension as fantasy. Rather, a serious consideration of the Real, I think, accounts the seemingly implausible machinations of contemporary reactionary politics in the current conjuncture.

The (K)Not Real To understand the significance of the Real, we need to shift from the topology of the moebius, however, to that of the later Lacan—of the Borromean Knot (Fig. 6.1). Ungainly as it may be, Lacan’s take on language in this later work, complements Hall’s notion of language—as representation—as productive and material. Rather than seeing language as a Symbolic overlay which either correctly shows the structure of things as they are, or distorts them, Lacan’s knitting together of the three orders of Real, Symbolic and Imaginary demands that language—representation, articulation, utterance

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Fig. 6.1 Lacan’s Borromean knot

and fantasy—always and also gestures towards the torsions and impossibility of the structure itself. The topology of the knot means that the Symbolic and the Imaginary—as signification—cannot be separated or undone from the Real—that thing which cannot be signified, but paradoxically, and necessarily produces signification through the generation of lack, desire and drive (Lacan 1999 [1972–1973]). This knotty topology is a more useful tool than the reveal-of-the-real for understanding the current conjuncture. To return to Gramsci: why do the people support what is clearly not in their interest? Why, despite the proliferation of facts, do those who peddle the ideology of reaction succeed? A fantasy of the good life, proffered by those in power—for sure. But still, desire for such power, according to Lacan at least, exceeds the fantasy. We can account for this through a discussion of Freud’s idea of negation—taken up as it is by Lacan, but (and here I am obviously indebted) made topical and lively in the current moment, by Žižek and Zupanˇciˇc. The heart of the Knot is, well, a not —that objet petit a which eludes the positivity of enunciation, but nonetheless drives the subject towards a miscellany of objects in the hopes of finding, embracing and articulating that little thing that is lost, gone and not there. The objet petit a is that little kernel of the Real which pushes into the other orders of the Knot—the

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Symbolic and the Imaginary. It pushes the subject’s fixations in fantasy (the Imaginary) and gets tangled into the lapsus and slips brought forth in their speech (the Symbolic). The Lacanian Real is that of fundamental loss and the irredeemable impossibility of relationality (in language or otherwise). Once the subject comes into being, the cut of the Symbolic has, necessarily, already occurred; what is lost clusters in the objet petit a. The Real is impossible to face, except through that little bit—the special objet —which causes and drives desire. This summary, I hope, shows that the Real, in Lacan’s understanding, is negative. It does not, and cannot, stack up in the positive terms with which the logic of the fact-checked, or in Lacan’s terms the scientific, ‘real Real’ (no matter how we shuffle the deck). But, and here again, we get tangled in another paradox, the Real is materialised through its very negativity. This is not the simple flip favoured through the dualised topologies, characterised by fact-checking. The Real’s materiality is not a movement from the negative to the positive; from hollow falseness to fulsome fact. Rather, the impetus of the Real, circulating as it does in the objet petit a, manifests in the other two orders as the fantasy of the whole—a fantasy that never quite satisfies—but is more than compelling nonetheless and around which the fleshy, material subject orbits. As Zupanˇciˇc notes in her discussion of the analysand’s insistence on the ‘not-mother’ in a dream, the revelation that the dream—and the unconscious—is actually concerned with the disavowed object (the mother) does not relieve the analysand’s symptom, thus concluding the analysis. Far from it. This is where, as she points out, analysis begins (p. 1). In the articulated repression of the analysand’s ‘representation’—the designation of the dream is not about the mother—there is a negation of the negation: the word [‘mother’] is uttered as denied, and the repression coexists with the thing being consciously spoken out. (p. 2)

What Zupanˇciˇc, and Žižek note is that it is not so straightforward as to translate the machinations of the unconscious as ‘really’ about this or that which is repressed. While this is important, the fact ‘symptoms persist’, points us to the objet petit a, and its indexing of the Real. Through the double negation—what Zupanˇciˇc calls the ‘with-without’—the ‘irreducible crack’ of the objet petit a ‘becomes visible’:

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We are dealing precisely with something like ‘it is not not-mother’, and this double negation circumscribes something that makes it irreducible to simply ‘mother’ (or her absence). (ibid.)

Further, and here I feel it is worth quoting Zupanˇciˇc at length, the designation of the ‘not-’ might be ‘taken for nothing’ yet, and this is important, ‘this is precisely a nothing that cannot be cut off as if it was nothing—at least not without consequences’. She continues, highlighting the torsion of the Real to which the with-without refers: What must … be asked is what is it in the mother … that enables, or generates her repression. And by this I don’t have in mind this or that characteristic of the mother, but the point of impossibility that determines her in her structural reality. (p. 7)

Žižek also emphasises the importance of this irreducible site in his critique of Althusser’s conception of ideology. He paraphrases the paradox proffered by Lacan: ‘I know very well that my wife is unfaithful, but I nonetheless believe that she is’. Here, Žižek unpicks the real (as in the actual) in terms of knowledge and belief—emphasising that the tautological, and as Lacan notes, pathological articulation of knowledge with belief in the husband’s utterance demonstrates something uncanny. Following Lacan’s insistence—elaborated in his work on the four discourses—that complete knowledge is impossible, Žižek writes ‘Belief … supplements a gap, an immanent split, within knowledge’ (p. 133). But in this papering over of the gap (between what is ‘known’ as fact and the sometimes-wilful transposition of the ‘not-fact’ of belief) there is always a third; a left-over and remainder. Žižek notes that Althusser’s take on ideology depends on both knowledge and belief and, even gestures towards negation—in the discussion of the RSAs’ deterrent authority; the strength of the spectacular lack of violently repressive intervention in Paris 1968 being a key example. Nonetheless, as Žižek points out, Althusser does not sufficiently account for the paradoxical and contradictory manner in which ideology works—through its entanglement with the Real. While, as Žižek notes, Althusser emphasises the materiality of ideology—his recourse to a Pascal-ian practice-makesperfect understanding of the subject’s immersion in ideology is insufficient for the puzzle of je sais bien, mais quand même …. Like the analysand declaring that his dream is not about his mother—while in his very declaration demonstrating some knowledge that it no doubt is —ideology necessitates

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an understanding of that something more which compels the subject to declare, repeat, repress but nonetheless materialise and articulate that negative. Belief—located only in the Imaginary—is not enough. To return to the topic at hand—how does this account for the remainder, the third order entangled with, driving and producing the Symbolic and the Imaginary, that of the Real—help us to grapple with the current conjuncture, so concerned as it is with the ‘real’ of the actual? I will close with a brief discussion of one, perhaps obvious, examples from social media. A trending ‘not-tag’: #NotMyPresident. The circulation of this not-tag after the election of Trump in 2016 shows the limitations of the presence/absence; real/not real bind of a politics of the ‘not’, but also, too, I hope, the need for an account for what slips outside binarised oppositional frameworks—in the curious space of negation. Briefly, in response to Trump’s election the slogan ‘Not My President’13 was mobilised by twitter users as the hashtag #NotMyPresident on election evening. It gathered momentum after his victory, becoming a by-line for large-scale protests around the USA. While this was the peak of the not-tag’s visibility, it still circulates on twitter as a signifier of criticism of Trump. #NotMyPresident also has a popular Facebook page; its description declaring: Donald Trump does not represent me! America needs a real president! (#NotMyPresident 2016–2019)

This description works as a suitable example for my provocation regarding psychoanalysis as a useful conjunctural tool. The statement demonstrates negation as disavowal. The declaration that Trump does not ‘represent’ the makers and followers of the page and not-tag indicates an obvious repression. Presumably, those who ‘like’ the page did not vote for Trump. However, the truth is that he is President and did win the election—despite the belief that he is unrepresentative of the many Americans inferred by the ‘me’ in this sentence. That Trump takes up a position which, in fact, makes sense in the current conjuncture of unbridled neo-liberalism; rising racism and nationalism; and emphatic anti-intellectualism has been discussed at

13 Note that the phrase ‘Not My President’ was leveraged against George W. Bush and also used by Tea Party faithful against Obama (West 2017).

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Fig. 6.2 Posts on the #NotMyPresident Facebook page

length elsewhere (including by Žižek). Suffice to say that Trump’s Presidency is actual, no matter one’s belief that he apparently lacks representative credentials. This quote also rehearses the familiar pivot on the real/not-real in the declaration that Trump is not a ‘real’ President—a notion echoed in coterminous and sometimes overlapping tweets declaring that Trump is a ‘fake President’ (Fig. 6.2).14 This not-tag operates through the same ‘reveal’ logic as the fact-checking sites discussed above. Many of the tweets retweet Trump’s notorious tweeted aphorisms, or simply respond to his latest statements in popular media, with a rundown of ‘facts’ (in turn, hashtagged as #facts) and link through to journalistic fact-checking pages. #NotMyPresident, though, also (even mostly) operates without recourse to the stacks of statistics and expert-mediated data discussed above. These ‘reveals’ link Trump’s not-realness to a lack of integrity which undermines the presumed, realness of numerous virtuous signifiers: Barack Obama; the Democratic Party—even America’s ‘greatness’—a kind of clapback to Trump’s own #MAGA hashtag.15 One example will have to suffice: 14 Stephen King’s tweet “The news is real. The President is fake” being the most famous of this type—garnering 321,000 ‘hearts’ on twitter (@StephenKing 2017). 15 We could contend the problem with Trump is precisely that he uncovers the realness of the political elite. See Nicholls (2016) discussion of ‘Baudrillard in a ‘post-truth’ world’ which provides an interesting groundwork for a critique of the rise of Trump.

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@realDonaldTrump you are a legend in your own mind. The world will rejoice when you are no longer the leader of the greatest country in the free world. You had noting [sic] to do with that fact either. It was great before you and will be better after you! #NotMyPresident. (@krisly68 2019)

@krisly68’s slip that the USA’s status as the ‘greatest country in the free world’ had nothing to do with Trump is neat but also demonstrates the problem of negation in a ‘not-tag’ type of approach to ideology. @krisly68 presumes the fantasy of a whole ‘great’ America—Imaginary, ideological— yes. A recourse to facts (in his own mind or not, Trump is President) does not interrupt her common-sense belief that America is ‘free’ and that she is a free agent within it. This articulation is indexed through the ‘nottag’—the relegation of Trump to merely a fiction (‘a legend in your own mind’) or falsity; but materialising him nonetheless through the disavowal of his leadership. However, we could also consider this tweet through Zupanˇciˇc’s account of negation as a with-without that indicates not only what is repressed, but that crack of the objet petit a which generates such vociferous repression. Yes, Trump as President exists—but @krisly68 and her not-ing/noting also indicate the impossibility of America as completely great and free. Otherwise why would this not-tag continue to trend three years after his election? Zupanˇciˇc writes that the analysand’s declaration that the dream is ‘not about the mother’ always ‘contains a dimension of truth; it indicates that whatever I can refind in reality is never IT’ (p. 9). Those who declare Trump is #NotMyPresident—more so than any reveal-of-thereal facts—do reveal an involuntary truth—that no matter the word, the figure, or the President it is impossible to ‘represent me!’. This, I believe can only be accounted for through a serious consideration of the Lacanian Real.

References Althusser, L. (2012 [1971]). On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus (G. M. Goshgarian & B. Brewster, Trans.). London: Verso. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. (2019a). RMIT ABC Fact Check. https:// www.abc.net.au/news/factcheck/. Accessed 28 June 2019. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. (2019b). About Fact Check. RMIT ABC Fact Check. https://www.abc.net.au/news/factcheck/about/. Accessed 28 June 2019.

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Australian Broadcasting Corporation Education. (2018). How RMIT ABC Fact Check Works. ABC Education: Media Literacy. https://www.abc.net.au/ education/media-literacy/fact-check/10055682. Accessed 30 June 2019. Belot, H. (2019, 18 May). Election 2019: Scott Morrison “I Have Always Believed in Miracles” as Coalition Retains Power. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-18/federal-election-result2019-antony-green-calls-shock-victory/11126536. Accessed 29 June 2019. Berlant, L. (2018). The Predator and the Jokester. In Where Freedom Starts: Sex Power Violence #MeToo (pp. 193–201). London: Verso. Bérubé, M. (2009, 14 September). What’s the Matter with Cultural Studies? The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/Whatsthe-Matter-With/48334. Accessed 30 June 2019. Bowman, P. (2006). Cultural Studies and Slavoj Žižek. In G. Hall & C. Birchall (Eds.), New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory (pp. 162–178). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (Ed.). (1978). On Ideology. London: Hutchinson. Copjec, J. (1994). Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. London: Verso. Druick, Z. (2016). The Myth of Media Literacy. International Journal of Communication, 10, 1125–1144. Evans, D. (1996). An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge. Freud, S. (1975 [1925]). Negation. In Standard Edition 19: The Ego and the Id (pp. 235–239). New York: Vintage. Hall, S. (1978). The Hinterland of Science: Ideology and The “Sociology of Knowledge”. In Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (Eds.), On Ideology (pp. 9–32). London: Hutchinson. Hall, S. (1981a). In Defence of Theory. In R. Samuel (Ed.), People’s History and Socialist Theory (pp. 378–385). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Hall, Stuart. (1981b). Notes on Deconstructing “the Popular”. In R. Samuel (Ed.), People’s History and Socialist Theory (pp. 227–241). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Hall, S. (1982). The Rediscovery of “Ideology”: Return of the Repressed in Media Studies. In M. Gurevitch, T. Bennett, J. Curran, & J. Woollacott (Eds.), Culture, Society and the Media (pp. 52–86). London: Routledge. Hall, S. (2005). New Labour’s Double Shuffle. The Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies, 27 (4), 319–335. Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clark, J., & Roberts, B. (1975). Policing the Crisis: ‘Mugging’, the State and Law and Order. London: Macmillan. Hall, S., Hobson, D., Lowe, A., & Willis, P. (Eds.). (1980). Culture, Media, Language. London: Hutchinson.

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Hall, S., & Jefferson, T. (Eds.). (1975). Resistance Through Rituals: Youth subcultures in Post-War Britain. London: Hutchinson. Hall, S., & Massey, D. (2010). Interpreting the Crisis. Soundings, 44, 57–71. Hamad, R. (2019, 19 June). Folau’s Fall Is a Story of Whiteness. Meanjin. https:// meanjin.com.au/blog/folaus-fall-is-a-story-of-whiteness/. Accessed 30 June 2019. Hasham, N. (2019, 19 May). ‘I Always Believed in Miracles’: Scott Morrison Celebrates as Bill Shorten Concedes Defeat. The Sydney Morning Herald. https:// www.smh.com.au/federal-election-2019/i-always-believed-in-miracles-scottmorrison-celebrates-as-bill-shorten-concedes-defeat-20190518-p51osw.html. Accessed 30 June 2019. Homer, S. (2019). Lacanian Left. In Y. Stavrakakis (Ed.), Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory (pp. 95–106). London: Routledge. Kaszubska, G. (2017). RMIT and ABC News Relaunch Fact Check. RMIT University. https://www.rmit.edu.au/news/all-news/2017/feb/rmit-and-abc-newsrelaunch-fact-check. Accessed 30 June 2019. @krisly68. (2019, 19 June). @realDonaldTrump you are a legend in your own mind. The world will rejoice when you are no longer the leader of the greatest country in the free world. You had noting [sic] to do with that fact either. It was great before you and will be better after you! #NotMyPresident. Twitter. https://twitter.com/krisly68/status/1141327506324303872. Accessed 29 June 2019. Lacan, J. (1997 [1959–1960]). Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (J.-A. Miller, Ed. & D. Potter, Trans.). New York: Norton. Lacan, J. (1999 [1972–1973]). Seminar XX: On Feminine Sexuality and the Limits of Love and Knowledge (Encore) (B. Fink, Trans.). New York: Norton. Lacan, J. (2007 [1949]). The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience. In B. Fink (trans.), Écrits. New York: Norton. Laclau, E., & Mouffe, C. (2014 [1985]). Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso. Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen, 16(3), 1–18. Nicholls, B. (2016). Baudrillard in a ‘Post-truth’ World: Groundwork for a Critique of the Rise of Trump. Medianz, 16(2), 6–30. https://medianz.otago.ac.nz/ medianz/article/view/206. #NotMyPresident. (2016–2019). Not My President: About. Facebook.com. https://www.facebook.com/NoPresidentTrump/. Accessed 29 June 2019. Panahi, R. (2019, 18 May). Scott Morrison’s Miracle Victory … the Left Reacts. Herald Sun. https://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/ rita-panahi/scott-morrisons-miracle-victorythe-left-reacts/news-story/ 42288757e2a9a031a6e459a284f008f5. Accessed 29 June 2019.

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Stavrakakis, Y. (Ed.). (2019). Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory. London: Routledge. @StephenKing. (2017, 10 July). The News Is Real. The President Is Fake. Twitter. https://twitter.com/stephenking/status/884179939905466368?. Accessed 29 June 2019. The New York Times. (2019). Fact-Checking Night 2 of the 2020 Democratic Debates. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/27/us/politics/factcheckdemocratic-debate.html. Accessed 28 June 2019. Thomsen, P. (2019, 14 April). Israel Folau’s Demise Is Also Partially Ours. E-Tangata. https://e-tangata.co.nz/comment-and-analysis/israel-folausdemise-is-also-partially-ours/. Accessed 30 June 2019. Tomšic, S. (2019). Capitalism. In Y. Stavrakakis (Ed.), Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory (pp. 296–306). London: Routledge. Turner, G. (2002 [1990]). British Cultural Studies: An Introduction. London: Routledge. Turner, G. (2011). What’s Become of Cultural Studies?. London: Sage. Turner, G. (2015). Re-inventing the Media. London: Routledge. Wallis, R., & Buckingham, D. (2016). Media Literacy: The UK’s Undead Cultural Policy. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 25(2), 188–203. West, L. (2017, 20 January). Not My President, Not Now, Not Ever. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/ opinion/presidential-inauguration-2017. Accessed 30 June 2019. Žižek, S. (2014). Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso. Zupanˇciˇc, A. (2012). Not-Mother: On Freud’s Verneinung. e-flux, 33, 1–9. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/33/68292/not-mother-on-freud-sverneinung/. Accessed 29 June 2019.

CHAPTER 7

Veils of Prejudice: Race and Class in the Current Conjuncture R. Harindranath

Race has, yet again, assumed a central role, not only in the theatre of national and global politics, but also in media, in culture, as well as in the everyday lives of those considered non-white or the religious minority. At the time of writing—late 2018 and early 2019—overt racist representations pervade the US midterm elections, in which sentiments that used to be on the fringes have become mainstream, and acts of extremism, as in Christchurch and parts of Sri Lanka, attest to the virulence of racially motivated violence. It can be argued that race is centrally implicated in the current conjuncture, as evident in instances such as the intertwining of public affect and political expediency that characterise anti-immigrant and anti-non-white views publicly expressed, in the anger that underpins such social movements as Black Lives Matter, and in nationalist marches of the English Defence League and its European, American and Australian counterparts. The clashes, that have grown more frequent in the last few years, between neo-nationalists and anti-fascists in several cities across the United

R. Harindranath (B) University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 R. Overell and B. Nicholls (eds.), Post-Truth and the Mediation of Reality, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25670-8_7

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States and Europe, bear witness to this centrality of race in contemporary cultural politics, as does the rise and consolidation of ethno-nationalist forms of populism, not only in those regions, but also in Asia. The culmination of these developments, at once symbolic and all too real, is, to allude to a state of affairs that has already become a cliché, with its attendant risks of foreshortening serious discussion and analysis, the election of Trump and other right-wing strongmen in Europe, Asia and Latin America. As I demonstrate in this essay, the lack of consensus among scholars of race and racial studies around issues of identity, of the links between race and class, and race and capitalism, is indicative of the complexity of the current conjuncture, which challenges attempts at identifying and narrating the diverse elements and articulations that constitute it. At the same time, it also underlines the difficulties inherent in endeavours to engage with the cultural and material forces that together comprise and articulate key characteristics of the ongoing crisis that we are witnessing. In this chapter, I outline some of these debates, by way of suggesting that understanding the historical, cultural and economic aspects of the current manifestations of racism involves considerable work that includes resolving these debates and disagreements. As the title suggests, this chapter sets out to explore the role of prejudice in the current conjuncture, the implication being that the latter is characterised by a fundamental lack of justice that is predicated upon a wilful disregard of how racism and racial prejudice has, both historically and in the current context, contributed to patterns of exploitation, marginalisation and the processes of cultural, political and economic precaritisation. Startled by the unforeseen results of the 2016 US election, scholars have scrambled for explanations, as indicated in a slew of publications that quickly followed in the wake of the election, among which several, such as Gest (2016) and Hochschild (2018), have looked at the alleged neglect of the ‘white working-class’ for answers. Over the last few years, race has figured in both an overt manner and as a dog-whistle issue in political and media discourses on immigration, refugee movements and national identity, particularly as an election issue, and among the consequences of these developments have been deportations, physical violence and verbal aggression, denial of rights and mass killings. The links between the Trumpian rhetoric and public expressions of racial hatred by ‘ordinary’ Americans have been highlighted repeatedly in both journalistic and academic publications, the most recent of which, in a New York Times report, featured a Trump tweet in which he refers to ‘Many Gang Members’ being part of

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the ‘caravan’ of impoverished seekers of asylum approaching the United States from parts of Latin America.1 The Australian Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton’s reference to alleged ‘African gangs’ in Melbourne terrorising the streets so much that residents are ‘scared to go out to restaurants’2 is a perfect instance of dog-whistling that raises race and immigration as an election issue, in this case African-Australians who arrived as refugees. It is also indicative of how far and how quickly Trumpisms have travelled, of the prejudices that lie just below the surface of civil societies in Europe, in settler colonies and postcolonial societies, and is a symptom of the backlash against progressive identity politics. The recent ‘OK to be White’ motion brought up in the Australian Senate3 is yet another indication of attempts to fracture societies along racial lines. The challenge, however, is to go beyond the condemnation of such positions and the evident dubiousness of their politics. The linking between race and crime recalls Hall et al.’s (2013 [1978]) conjunctural analysis in Policing the Crisis, to which we will have occasion to return later in the chapter. It is important here to reiterate that race has, once again, become incendiary, at once a fundamental part of ethnonationalist discourse and the fount of xenophobic politics, as well as the source of tremors that have fractured democratic societies. Race and racism have always been present as fault lines, whose periodic, seismic eruptions, private and/or public, follow racist acts and extremist violence, or when the racial underpinnings of state policies are made evident. On the other hand, the fallout from what is perceived as the consequences of the rise of identity politics has contributed to the increasing popularity of antiimmigrant pogroms and fascistic xenophobia. These issues also animate ongoing debates among scholars of race, in particular, regarding the validity of identity politics, of the economic and cultural histories that underpin

1 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/29/us/politics/caravan-trump-shooting-

elections.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage, October 2018.

accessed

2 https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/jan/03/peter-dutton-saysvictorians-scared-to-go-out-because-of-african-gang-violence, accessed 3 January 2018. 3 https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/oct/15/ok-to-be-whiteaustralian-government-senators-condemn-anti-white-racism, accessed 16 October 2016.

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racism and racial thinking, and of the abiding tensions that constitute multicultural and multiracial societies. What these various developments highlight is the nature of the crisis that we are currently experiencing, which has multiple dimensions designating it and multiple forces acting on it.

The Paradoxes of Race and Racism Responses to the flow of refugees is a case in point. Sivanandan (2006) hints at this overdetermined process when he argues that the racism that underpins the treatment of asylum seekers and immigrants, ‘passed off as xenophobia’ has another side: ‘the preservation and defence of “our people,” “our culture,” our race—nativism, which, in the way it denigrates and reifies people before segregating and/or deporting them … is racism in substance, though xeno in form. It is xeno-racism, a racism of global capital’ (p. 2). Alluding to the historical, institutional and political aspects that together constitute racist and xenophobic responses to refugees and nonwhite immigrants, he argues that it is institutional racism, sedimented over centuries of colonialism and now woven into social structures and state instruments, that needs to be contested, not the personal prejudices of individuals. This, he points out, is obscured by the multicultural policies of successive governments in the UK, policies that, instead of recognising the multicultural makeup of society as pluralism (which ‘envisages a culturally diverse society’) promoted ‘culturalism, [which] engendered a culturally divisive society. Multiculturalism as such did not create separatism or ethnic enclaves. Culturalism did’ (p. 3). For him, the reification of alleged cultural or ethnic ‘values’ is detrimental to the well-being of the culturally diverse, pluralist, societies. Underpinning these arguments lies his main concern— that, in their zeal to respond to racism in the cultural terrain, activists and scholars risk overlooking the economic or class dimension that engender such forms of divisive politics. Sivanandan’s argument epitomises the concerns of those for whom the material aspects of racism are obscured by the insistence on group identity based on notions of cultural exclusiveness. More recently, Coates (2015) has raised a similar question regarding the origins and continuation of racism and the racist foundations of American life. In his formulation, the American Dream is exclusively white, and it necessarily, for its own survival and protraction, hides its exclusionist aspects and its history of exploitation and slavery, and of segregationist policies. Coates is only one of the recent writer-scholars to explore the fundamental

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paradox that is inherent in the diverse forms of racism, an indication of the emergence of a consensus around the issue. He argues that Americans believe in the reality of “race” as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world. Racism – the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them – inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. … But race is the child of racism, not the father. (p. 7; emphasis added)

Similarly, Haider (2018), in his exploration of racial ideology, has argued that ‘race is produced by racism, not the other way around.’ Nevertheless, ‘[t]he ideology of race claims that we can classify people according to specific physical characteristics, which usually revolve around skin color. But this is an arbitrary form of classification that only has any meaning at all because it has social effects ’ (p. 43; emphasis added). And finally, Mitchell (2012) refers to this paradox in his declaration that we are misled ‘by the deceptive form of the pairing of race and racism,’ because, unlike other such pairings the root term is not the primary and the ‘ism’ a derivative of it: ‘With race and racism, it is the exact opposite. Racism is the brute fact, the bodily reality, and race is the derivative term.’ In other words, ‘Race is not the cause of racism but its excuse, alibi, explanation, or reaction formation’ (p. 19; emphasis added). Race, he affirms, ‘is both an illusion and a reality that resists critical demolition or replacement by other terms such as ethnicity, nationality, civilization or culture’ (p. 14, emphasis in the original). Despite avowals of this being a post-racial world in which ‘race’ no longer matters, racism persists. This apparent contradiction animates the paradox, which, in turn, informs debates, both scholarly and political, in particular, on the issues that contribute to current crises, including identity, the economy of race and racism, cross-border mobility and Indigenous struggles. In other words, the paradox that is at the heart of racial distinctions and racist politics underpins two urgent issues that we currently face: the moral, political and strategic validity of struggles for recognition, or what has come to be termed, rather loosely and problematically, as identity politics, and the materialist or economic foundations of exploitation and marginalisation that underpin racial hierarchisation, as identified by analyses of racial capitalism. Arguably, both these issues are crucial aspects of the current conjuncture, even if, as we shall see, the topic of identity and the politics that it has engendered are characterised by a distinct lack of consensus among scholars. As Mitchell (2012) asks, ‘Why do our fellow citizens,

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not to mention our government and laws, continue to behave as if race still matters?’ (p. 15). Why and how do racial forms of discrimination persist, when the concepts of race and racial difference are generally accepted as obsolete? Mitchell makes a case for considering race as ‘a medium,’ recalling Du Bois’s powerful metaphor of the veil that seems to condense in one vivid figure so many of the fundamental contradictions of race understood as a medium (p. 13). Importantly, however, ‘beyond the question of mediated sights and sounds, the medium of race is constituted as “material social practice,” as Raymond Williams put it, that is manifested at every level of human life’ (p. 13). This last point—of the medium of race constituted as material social practice, underpins calls for racial justice that bring together diverse concerns, ranging from cultural violence conceived as denial of voice, economic justice in terms of redressing historical and contemporary forms of exploitation, to demands for political representation. In his formulation of ‘the notion of pure procedural justice’ or the principles of justice as fairness, John Rawls invokes the image of the veil, formulated differently from that of Du Bois. Rawls recommends the adoption of a ‘veil of ignorance’ in order to ‘nullify the effects of specific contingencies which put men at odds and tempt them to exploit social and natural circumstances to their own advantage. … They do not know how the various alternative will affect their own particular case and they are obliged to evaluate principles solely on the basis of general considerations’ (1999, p. 118). This raises the attendant question of whether, in the case of the invisible Other, characterised by cultural and economic precarity and marginalisation, such ‘general considerations’ even apply. How does the treatment of Indigenous communities in settler colonies and of global refugees exemplify aspects of the current conjuncture?

Conjunctural Analysis As is well known, the multiple-authored Policing the Crisis, offers the perfect illustration of conjunctural analysis as it attempts to unpack the multiple, often contradictory, and both overdetermined and underdetermined forces that contribute to and are manifest in a case of ‘mugging,’ race and crime in Britain. At stake here are both the concept of conjuncture as well as conjunctural analysis as a methodology, both of which are significant in the present context. The notion of ‘conjuncture,’ it must be noted, has been conceived differently by different scholars. Callinicos (2005) contrasts

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Anderson’s understanding of ‘conjunctural explanation’ as ‘the intersection of different historical temporalities, to compose a typically overdetermined configuration’ (quoted in Callinicos 2005, p. 355) with Jameson’s preference to the organising concept of ‘the epoch rather than conjuncture. …For Jameson, the historical context of Postmodernism corresponds to not a specific conjuncture, but an entire phase in the history of capitalism’ (p. 359). Such diverse conceptions of ‘conjuncture’ arguably inform their methodologies, which, in turn, influence their analyses and theoretical refinements. For Hall, ‘a conjuncture is a period during which the different social, political, economic and ideological contradictions that are at work in society come together to give it a specific and distinctive shape’ (Hall and Massey 2010, p. 57). Analysing the conjuncture therefore involves identifying ‘the multiple forces, tendencies, pressures in play in a historical moment and to identify how the balances of forces are being worked on, shaped, directed in the search for a “solution” and a “way forward”’ (Clarke 2008, p. 125). To Clarke, conjunctural analysis combines ‘the concern that a sign (“mugging”) [in Policing the Crisis ] condenses and articulates many meanings and puts them to work in a specific setting’ with the recognition that ‘conjunctures are always in process. As a result, their character and direction cannot be known in advance or specified theoretically: conjunctural analysis requires analytical work’ (2008, p. 125). Hall et al.’s 1978 study can therefore be considered as approximating Anderson’s conception of ‘conjunctural understanding’ rather than the Jamesonian version of epochal analysis, as indicated by Clarke’s emphasis on ‘the importance of thinking conjuncturally, examining the heterogeneity of the present rather than treating it in epochal terms (of either continuity or rupture)’ (2010, p. 352). Steadfastly avoiding a linear perspective on the crisis they were analysing, the researchers who contributed to the Policing the Crisis project attempted to track the manifold ‘moments’ enfolded in ‘mugging,’ ‘the multiple contexts that made that moment imaginable, possible and contingently necessary’ (Clarke 2010, p. 340), analysing the ways in which ‘the articulated questions of race, nation and social order are understood as necessary elements of both the crisis and its (attempted) resolution’ (p. 341). As Hall et al. (2013 [1978]) point out, they were interested in tracing the temporal and structural—in the form of ‘overlapping of different periodisations,’ and ‘structurally different forces developing at different tempos and rhythms of, in fact, different “histories”’ (p. 216). In his discussion with Massey (Hall and Massey 2010), Hall insists that, while the recognising the centrality

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of the economic sector in the financial crisis that followed the collapse of banks in 2008, there are other factors, political-ideological, socio-cultural and philosophical, that contributed to the crisis being overdetermined. He cautions against falling back on economic determinism: ‘any serious analysis of the crisis must take into account its other “conditions of existence” … [W]e must address the complexity of the crisis as a whole. This is a difficult balance, but … crises are always overdetermined. Different levels of society, the economy, politics, ideology, common sense, etc, come together or “fuse”’ (p. 59). Hall’s position is thus different from that of Sivanandan’s which, as we saw earlier, insists on the economic and class dimensions. Gramsci’s formulations and ideas are particularly evident throughout Policing the Crisis, and were central to Hall’s engagement with the question of race and class. For Hall (1986), the question of the inter-relationship between race and class has proved to be one of the most complex and difficult theoretical problems to address, and it has frequently led to the adoption of one or another extreme positions. Either one “privileges” the underlying class relationships, emphasising that all ethnically and racially differentiated labour forces are subject to the same exploitative relationships with capital; or one emphasizes the centrality of ethnic and racial categories and divisions at the expense of the fundamental class structuring of society. (pp. 435–436)

While acknowledging that ‘Gramsci did not write about race, ethnicity or racism in their contemporary meanings or manifestations’ (p. 415; emphasis in the original), in order to avoid this unproductive dichotomy between race and class, Hall calls for a ‘non-reductive approach,’ inspired by Gramsci’s framework, ‘to the race/class question,’ as ‘they are inverse, mirrorimages of each other, in the sense that, both feel required to produce a single and exclusive determining principle of articulation’ (p. 436). Scholarly work on issues of race, including studies and interventions that fall within fields such as critical race studies, race and identity, multiculturalism and citizenship, cultural studies, as well as disciplines including sociology, anthropology and politics, have had to deal with the tensions and the interrelationship between race and class, in other words, between culture and economy. For our immediate purposes, one of the most pertinent questions that need to be addressed is: how do we begin to formulate an informed understanding of the current conjuncture that is characterised by the crisis identified earlier? What ‘multiple temporalities’ can be identified in the

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re-emergence of racial politics and racism? How do codified references to ‘criminal gangs,’ in connection with non-White immigrants and would-be migrants, constitute ‘a site in which [these multiple temporalities] become condensed, entangled and coconsititutive of crisis’? And in what ways does the renewal of the politics of white supremacy ‘mark this moment of condensation: an accumulation of tendencies, forces, antagonisms and contradictions’ (Clarke 2010, p. 341; emphasis in the original)? Any attempt to explore these questions touches on ongoing debates that remain unresolved, including the issue of whether it is legitimate, in struggles for equal rights, to emphasise racial and ethnic identity and difference.

Legible Fractures in Race Scholarship If one of the responses to, as well as manifestations of, the crisis that characterises the current conjuncture is the fracturing of the demos along racial lines, scholarship on race, racism and multiracial communities displays fissures that attest to disagreements on what could be considered fundamental issues. One of these is with the political and cultural validity of articulating racial difference even in anti-fascist movements. While, for scholars such as Gilroy (2000), and more recently Haider (2018), advocating resistance on the basis of identity politics and racial difference raises significant philosophical and ethico-political questions respectively, for others such as Chrisman (2011), discarding racial identity risks endangering the struggle for equal rights. One of the clearest articulations of Gilroy’s concerns is in his Between Camps (2000), in which he advocates forms of ‘planetary humanism’ and ‘strategic universalism,’ as a desirable future, underpinned by a sense of ‘anti-anthropological sameness’ (p. 98). In this scenario there is little room for conceptions of identity that emphasise particularity or specificity: Where the word becomes a concept, identity has been made central to a number of urgent theoretical and political issues, not last belonging, ethnicity, and nationality. Racialized conflicts, for example, are now understood by many commentators as a problem of the incompatible identities that mark out deeper conflicts between cultures and civilizations. (p. 98)

Building on Butler’s observation that ‘what we expect from the term identity will be cultural specificity, and that on occasion we even expect identity and specificity to work interchangeably’ (quoted in Gilroy 2000, pp. 98–99;

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emphasis in the original), Gilroy argues that emphasising identity politics reifies particularity and belonging to such an extent that identity ceases ‘to mean an ongoing process of self-making and social interaction. It becomes instead something to be possessed and displayed. It is a silent sign that closes down the possibility of communication across the gulf between one heavily defended island of particularity and its equally well fortified neighbours’ (p. 103). Such politics animates against his recommendation of planetary humanism and cosmopolitanism as a way of engaging with and transforming what he sees as the undesirable outcomes of politics based on difference, and the political consequences of inequality. ‘Difference,’ he argues, ‘corrupts and compromises identity’ (p. 105). The ‘against race’ position that Gilroy adopts, and which he argues is necessary to clear the obstructions to the possibility of cosmopolitan, convivial futures that difference-as-identity poses, has been critiqued by scholars like Patricia Hill Collins and Simon Gikandi. One of the most notable of these critics is Laura Chrisman, who, arguing against the deployment of Gilroy’s reading of Du Bois and Fanon in his recent books, finds his theses on the dangers of political cultures based on raciological emphasis on identity unconvincing or at the very least limiting. One of her main criticisms of his reading of Fanon is that he ignores the latter’s linking of the colonial-racial analysis with the economic. For Chrisman, Fanon’s insistence that capitalism is ‘central to operations of colonial racism’ suggests that any move towards non-racial humanism is dependent ‘upon the creation of new economic relations within the post-colonial state, and across the post-colonial world’ (2011 p. 24; emphasis in the original). In his reading of Fanon, Wallerstein (2009) recognises his ambivalence to notions of identity: while, on the one hand, Fanon allowed that it was the basis on which the colonised could assert their distinctive claims to nationhood, on the other, he was concerned that cultural or racial identity by itself is insufficient. In Wallerstein’s reading, this is because for Fanon ‘the assertion of particularity is stultifying and leads inevitably to “pitfalls.” The class struggle is central, provided we know which are the classes that are really struggling. But lumpen-classes, on their own, without organizational structure, burn out’ (p. 125). Gilroy, Chrisman, and Wallerstein are thus emblematic of the diverse positions that have contributed to debates on race, on the rationale and desirability of identity politics, and on the race and class dialectic. Chrisman’s position vis-à-vis Gilroy’s could perhaps be characterised as concerns about the overlaps between race and class, as opposed to arguments for a cosmopolitan planetary humanism

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that is aware of the dangers of discourses of cultural-racial exclusivism. The crux of the issue is this: how to recognise the reality of and oppose racism while remaining wary of the perils of reifying race? As Malik (2008) asks, ‘how should we deal with race as it is actually lived,’ while acknowledging that reifying difference is reactionary? Haider (2018) brings a slightly different emphasis to his concerns on the reification of difference in identity politics: that anti-racist politics that is confined to and is based on claims of racial, sexual or gender difference precludes the formations of solidarity that are crucial for societal and political change. The latter involves transcending rather than proclaiming difference. Identity based politics, in other words, dilutes leftist struggles and the challenges it ought to pose the racial logic that is intrinsic to both histories of capitalist exploitation and to current, neoliberal ideologies and practices. Mobilising critiques of the concept of identity and identity politics such as Judith Butler, Wendy Brown and Paul Gilroy, Haider argues that ‘it is possible to reject racism while still falling victim to the ideology of race. Taking the category of race as a given, as a foundation for political analysis, still reproduces this ideology’ (p. 43). Gilroy and Haider share a concern about the dangers of identity politics, as well as a desire—both intellectual and political—to go beyond race, to transcend racial divides in order to reach for a common set of interests. In Gilroy’s case, as we have seen, the desirable future is a kind of cosmopolitan, post-racial, conviviality, whereas for Haider, it is a return to non-racial labour struggles for equality. Chrisman’s disagreements with Gilroy appear to stem, at least partly, from what she considers the politics of the now—current and ongoing struggles that highlight and engage with racial violence, systematic and enduring patterns of marginalisation from various democratic processes, and institutional and structural racism that is embedded in Western societies and settler colonies. While Gilroy and Haider are keen to affirm a common humanity, Chrisman seems anxious to underscore what these struggles are striving to achieve as a necessary precondition to cosmopolitan living.

Racial Capitalism Both Haider’s concerns regarding the formations of oppositional politics that transcend racial identity in its struggle for economic equality, as well as Chrisman’s arguments about race-based exclusion and exploitation find a place in relatively recent scholarly engagement with ‘racial capitalism.’ For example, Dawson (2016) insists that, in addition to struggles for racial

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justice that address the diverse forms of racial violence that pervades the United States (and by extension other settler colonies as well as Europe) and has become a part of both political and everyday culture, we need to focus more intensely on ‘the deep structural economic inequality that particularly plagues black communities while simultaneously and massively corrupting whatever semblance of representative democracy remains’ (p. 144). This linking of economic inequality, race and the subversion of democratic processes is significant, as it points to a few of the relevant aspects of the current conjuncture. Moreover, it also enables the development of an analytical frame with which to examine the increasing racialisation of political discourse and election campaigns, in which the elements that Dawson mentions appear to work alongside xenophobia, religious fundamentalism, nationalism and White nationalism. These tensions and contradictions, however, need to be looked at within the broader context that links race, class and capitalism—in both its historical and contemporary forms. Recent scholarly work in what might be called the political economy of racism and racial injustice has started addressing this broader context, deploying conceptual clarification and development to engage with the history of slavery and settler colonialism as well as with neoliberal forms of capitalism and the crisis of 2008. Arguing that ‘capitalism is racial capitalism’ (p. 77; emphasis in the original), Melamed (2015), in her attempt to ‘strengthen the activist hermeneutic, ‘racial capitalism,’ identifies three conditions with which critical ethnic studies ought to engage: firstly, the processes of primitive accumulation that includes displays of ‘violence toward others’ and the expropriation ‘for capital the entire field of social provision (land, work, education, health)’; secondly, ‘the ideologies of individualism, liberalism, and democracy’ that have come to ‘monopolize the terms of sociality’; and finally, the new networks of activism that exhibit new alliances across regions and geographies and are ‘often Indigenous-led’ (p. 76). The processes of accumulation that are fundamental to capitalist processes, she argues, are, in turn, dependent on relations of inequality and ‘these antinomies of accumulation require loss, disposability, and the unequal differentiation of human value, and racism enshrines the inequalities that capitalism requires ’ (p. 77; emphasis added). Melamed’s frame of reference includes not just slavery, colonialism, and exploitation, but also the deployment of ideologies of nationalism, liberal democracy, and multiculturalism by contemporary formations of racial capitalism. While the first two, through their emphasis on citizenship and

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on the individual, undermine collectivity and reduce democratic participation ‘according to neoliberal logics of privatization, transactability, and profit’, multiculturalism ‘minoritizes, homogenizes, and constitutes groups as separate through single (or serial) axes of recognition (or oppression)’ (p. 79). While Melamed’s thesis is evidently built on Cedric Robinson’s premise that, rather than the European bourgeoisie rationalising social relations, as Marx and Engels had forecast, ‘The development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology. As a material force … racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent in capitalism’ (quoted in Melamed, p. 77), two other recent interventions on the interweaving of race and economy or race and class build on, extend, or readjust the optics of David Harvey’s compelling analysis of neoliberal forms of capitalism and capitalist logic in order to bring into focus how race and racism are implicated in these forms. Thus, Byrd et al. (2018), in their attempt to trace the lineaments of the co-constitutive nature of colonialism and racialism, as evidenced in the treatment of Indigenous peoples, find Harvey’s (2005) idea of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ inadequate for their purposes. They replace it with ‘economies of dispossession’ as analytic to examine the historical and constitutive intertwining of ‘racialized property subjection and expropriation through which capitalism and colonialism take shape historically and change over time’ (p. 2). Chakravartty and da Silva (2012) take on board Harvey’s (2010) observation—on how the media largely ignored the early foreclosures on housing in the United States in 2006, when they mostly affected African American, Hispanic and ‘women single-headed households,’ and showed interest only after the white middle-classes were affected in 2007—and suggest that ‘We need to ask the question that Harvey does not even consider …, which is: [W]hat is it about blackness and Latinidad that turns one’s house (roof, protection, and aspiration) and shelter into a death trap?’ (p. 367). Discussions stemming from the notion of accumulation by dispossession, they argue, tend to leave out ‘the consideration of how these “new territories” of consumption and investment have been mapped onto previous racial and colonial (imperial) discourses and practices’ (p. 368). In their turn, Lloyd and Wolfe (2016), while recognising the value of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ as Harvey’s attempt to revise and update Marx’s concept of ‘primitive accumulation’ in order to acknowledge the process as not just confined to the past or to an earlier stage, but as ongoing, argue that, in

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a similar fashion, settler colonialism too, cannot be confined to the past. Settler colonialism, for them, not only continues to influence the states founded on it but, importantly, also the developing global order it brought about. The logic that underpins this, it could be argued, is racial capitalism and colonial appropriation of Indigenous lands.

Denial of Rights and of Life While the concept of ‘racial capitalism’ attests to the continuing significance of race as an analytical category even while it presents a robust argument for the need, in struggles for racial justice, to move beyond the politics of identity, it is important to recognise the interconnections between rights, race and identity, which too, are manifest in the current conjuncture. These are, arguably, most legible in the case of Indigenous communities and refugee groups, on a political terrain in which, it can be argued, the denial of rights has strong overlaps with the identities that are assigned to these populations by majority or mainstream political cultures. Hannah Arendt’s observation on refugees, made more than sixty years back and soon after the conclusion of the Second World War, is, in many ways, still valid: the populations seeking refuge and asylum were, for her, ‘the most symptomatic group in contemporary politics’ (1951, p. 277) in that they are emblematic of the condition of rightlessness, of not having any legal status and, as a consequence, relegation to a state of non-being. At the beginning of the chapter entitled ‘The decline of the nation-state and the end of the rights of man’ Arendt (1951) proposes that the calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law and freedom of opinion … but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever. Their plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them; not that they are oppressed but that nobody wants even to oppress them. (p. 266)

As I have argued elsewhere (Harindranath 2017), issues of voice, recognition and the struggle for socio-political change continue to plague marginalised communities, the problematics that underlie liberal responses to ethnic cultural expression, and the racial and historical dynamics that underpin policies that serve to manage ethnic minorities, Indigenous communities and national borders. With regard to the nation and the coherence

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of national borders, as Gregory (2004) has pointed out, the arrival of the asylum seeker and the refugee ‘throws into crisis what Agamben calls “the originary fiction of sovereignty” because it calls into question the connective imperative that makes nativity the foundation of nationality and hence of the sovereign space of the nation-state’ (p. 258; emphasis in the original). While the image of the refugee is perceived to pose a threat to the territorial and political coherence of the state, the fiction of nativity that is overlaid on and contributes to the myths of national identity, particularly in settler colonies, simultaneously hides the violent appropriation and conquest of native land, and as a consequence renders Indigenous populations largely invisible in proclamations of nationality or national ‘values.’ As evident in the continuing struggle by Aboriginal Australians and Native Americans for land rights, this near-invisibility of Indigeneity—other than in profitable forms of cultural expression such as Aboriginal Art or in carefully managed performances that are emptied of much of cultural or political significance—matches attempts to keep the asylum seeker out of bounds and out of sight in internment camps. Running through the state’s barely legal and ethically questionable responses to demands for asylum from refugees and demands for traditional land rights from Indigenous communities is race. Discussions of the role of race in settler colonies are, therefore, pertinent here. Lloyd and Wolfe (2016) have pointed out that ‘[s]ettler colonialism is not some transitional phase that gives way to—or even provides a laboratory for—the emergent global order. In both the originary and the continuing senses, it is foundation to that order’ (p. 113). Settler colonialism invokes, displays and operationalises permanent spaces of exception. They build on Schmitt’s original argument that every nomos, or the way in which the world is ordered, is established on the basis of a boundary line or enclosure that delineates a spatial ordering, which stipulates a zone that is subject to a postponement of all law for particular periods and in specific places. Lloyd and Wolfe argue that settler colonialism’s extension of these states of exception is predicated on the ways in which it ‘permanently schedules the refractory Native alternative for elimination’ (p. 113). Similarly, Gregory’s argument that the ‘extra-territoriality of Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo’ (2004, p. 258) finds its echoes in the detention of asylum seekers by the Australian state in the outback and in camps located in Nauru and Papua New Guinea can be extended to Aboriginal populations not only in the outback but also in cities, who do not quite fit into the exultations of the merits of ‘Western civilization’ that are

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seen as marking colonial outposts such as Australia, which thus maintains its political-cultural links to Europe despite geographical distance. It is possible to argue that the racial politics inherent in discourses of national sovereignty that portray asylum seekers, refugees and Asian/African immigrants as potentially undermining the integrity of the nation, together with the perception of the arrival of such figures as an ‘invasion’ that threatens to dilute or modify the ‘national character’ by their very presence within the body-politic of the nation-state also pervades the political and economic invisibility of Indigenous communities. As Wolfe (2001) has argued, ‘settler colonialism introduces a zero-sum contest over land on which conflicting modes of production could not ultimately coexist. Thus the primary logic of settler colonialism can be characterized as one of elimination’ (p. 868). This defines the context in which ethnic media representation and the responses to it need to be considered. The recent rise in ethno-nationalist politics needs to be seen in the context of the histories of colonialism, slavery, indentured labour and the contemporary manifestations of racism, racial violence, marginalisation, the increase in and consolidation of anti-immigrant sentiments that pervade, and provide a spurious credibility to assertions of national identity that rest on proclamations of ‘cultural’ uniqueness. These are some of the ‘ruins and ruination’ that Stoler (2008) perceives as ‘imperial debris’: ‘the longevity of structures of dominance, and the uneven pace with which people can extract themselves from the colonial order of things’ (p. 193). The response that ‘All lives matter,’ heard all too often as a counter to the Black Lives Matter movement, is a spectacular instance of missing the point, as are declarations of ‘Indigenous’ status by second-generation white settlers in Australia, purely on the basis of them having been born in the country. Revealed in such responses and sentiments is a disturbing unwillingness to consider, or a wilful blindness to, the historical, structural, institutional aspects of a racial reality—the ‘imperial debris’—in which the lives of those who are not White matter less. Building on Fanon’s insight on structural and affective links between different forms of racism, Mitchell conceives of race as a medium in order to engage with the notion of race and how its manifestation in diverse forms of discrimination. As an ‘intervening substance,’ race as medium is ‘most explicit in the visual language of race which continually invokes the figures of the veil, the screen, the lens, the face, the mirror, the profile, line and color, and its paradoxical fusion in the figure of the “color line”’ (p. 13). Any attempt to argue that we now live in a post-racial world, or to relinquish

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race as a concept, however strongly we may agree, intellectually, on the fictional nature of racial distinctions, is to overlook the persistence of racial discrimination and the daily encounters with racism from fellow citizens, from institutions, from laws. In the case of seekers of asylum, this manifests not just in media discourses and public responses to them, but also in the technologies of bureaucracy that are deployed at the points of entry, since, as Mitchell points out, images and stereotypes precede the arrival of the refugee or asylum seeker at the border. For the sans papier refugee or immigrant, whose personhood itself is at stake without supporting documentary evidence that attests to who they claim to be, there is little hope crossing the barrier of the border. This is emblematic of Bhabha’s fundamental distinction between two types of encounters with the regime of border policing: ‘The globe shrinks for those who own it,’ but ‘for the displaced or the dispossessed, the migrant or the refugee, no distance is more awesome than the few feet across borders or frontiers’ (quoted in Gregory 2004, p. 257). If the denial of entry into spaces of security marks the experience of the global refugee, who is thereby rendered powerless and abject, remaining largely invisible, confined to internment camps for indefinite durations, the conditions of life for indigenous communities, the original inhabitants of lands conquered and settled are rendered equally abject and mostly invisible, their existence a constant and on-going struggle against hydro-electric projects, pipelines, or the mining rights, all instruments of the neo-liberal state and all challenging aboriginal land rights. Along with those living below the poverty line, indigenous communities as well as those fleeing persecution, war, and environmental disaster constitute the Global South, one rooted and the other mobile, who remain voiceless victims of policies and of prejudices, racial and moral, that inform national bureaucratic practices and policies.

Concluding Remarks This brief survey of the main concerns expressed in recent race scholarship, and the various, as yet unresolved, debates and disagreements that characterise it, highlights the continuing relevance of race in contemporary cultural politics. It also underscores the importance of ongoing discussions on race and racism, the validity of identity politics, the importance of examining the political economy of race, and the complex issue of race, identity and rights. Engaging with these issues requires taking into account the ways

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in which historical legacies continue to pervade the cultural and economicmaterial aspects of racism, raciology and racial politics that are condensed in the current crisis—in other words, doing a conjunctural analysis. There is no denying that one significant feature of the current conjuncture is the return to political prominence of race in various forms, from immigration as an electoral issue, and the dog whistle of race and crime, to the incarceration of refugees and asylum seekers, as well as the intensification of persistent forms of racial exploitation and the continuing struggles for Indigenous lands. The attendant success of populist politics riding on ethno-nationalism and the defence of ‘national cultures’ recalls Hall’s (1979) analysis of ‘authoritarian populism,’ in particular, his argument that the ‘swing to the Right’ should be seen not as a reflection of an economic crisis, but a response to it. If the rise of Thatcherism was a response to the economic recession of the 1970s, the return of anti-immigrant, neo-fascist populism that characterises the current conjuncture, manifest, as argued in this chapter, in the struggles over identity and recognition, racial capitalism and the sustained denial of rights. The racial basis of the current forms of authoritarian populism display features that Hall identified nearly forty years ago: it is ‘an exceptional form of the capitalist state—which, unlike classical fascism, has retained most (though not all) of the formal representative institutions in place, and which at the same time has been able to construct around itself an active popular consent. This undoubtedly represents a decisive shift in the balance of hegemony. … It has entailed a striking weakening of democratic forms and initiatives, but not their suspension’ (p. 15). While ongoing developments could be seen as a response to a combination of the failures of neoliberal policies, the fallouts from the 2008 economic crisis, and the processes of globalisation and internationalisation of labour, the terrain of the struggle against prevalent attempts to shore up extant hegemonies should take into account the racial dimensions identified in this chapter, and how these articulate with the economic crises to form the current conjuncture.

References Arendt, H. (1951). The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt. Byrd, J., Goldstein, A., Melamed, J., & Reddy, C. (2018). Predatory Value: Economies of Dispossession and Disturbed Relationalities. Social Text, 135(36), 1–18. Callinicos, A. (2005). Epoch and Conjuncture in Marxist Political Economy. International Politics, 42(3), 353–363.

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Chakravartty, P., & da Silva, D. F. (2012). Accumulation, Dispossession, and Debt: The Racial Logic of Global Capitalism—An Introduction. American Quarterly, 64(3), 361–385. Chrisman, L. (2011). The Vanishing Body of Franz Fanon in Paul Gilroy’s Against Empire and After Empire. The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research, 41(4), 18–30. Clarke, J. (2008). Still Policing the Crisis? Crime, Media, Culture, 4(1), 123–129. Clarke, J. (2010). On Crises and Conjunctures: The Problem of the Present. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 34(4), 337–354. Coates, T. (2015). Between the World and Me. New York: Spiegel & Grau. Dawson, M. (2016). Hidden in Plain Sight: A Note on Legitimation Crises and the Racial Order. Critical Historical Studies, 3(1, Spring), 143–161. Gest, J. (2016). The New Minority: White Working-Class Politics in the Age of Immigration and Inequality. New York: Oxford University Press. Gilroy, P. (2000). Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race. London: Allan Lane. Gregory, D. (2004). The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq. Oxford: Blackwell. Haider, A. (2018). Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump. London: Verso. Hall, S. (1979, 14–20 January). The Great Moving Right Show. Marxism Today. Hall, S. (1986). Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. In D. Morley & K. Chen (Eds.), (1996). Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (pp. 411–440). London: Routledge. Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J., & Roberts, B. (2013). Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law & Order (2nd ed.; originally published in 1978). Houndmills: Palgrave. Hall, S., & Massey, D. (2010). Interpreting the Crisis. Soundings, 44, 57–71. Harindranath, R. (2017). Peripheral Voices, Marginal Lives: Representation, Subalternity and Proximate Suffering. In F. Martin (Ed.), Communicating Worlds: Access, Voice, Diversity, Engagement. Refereed Proceedings of the Australia New Zealand Communications Association Conference. Harvey, D. (2005). The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harvey, D. (2010). The Enigma of Capital. London: Profile Books. Hochschild, A. R. (2018). Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. New York: New Press. Lloyd, D., & Wolfe, P. (2016). Settler Colonial Logics and the Neoliberal Regime. Settler Colonial Studies, 6(2), 109–118. Malik, K. (2008). Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides Are Wrong in the Race Debate. Oxford: Oneworld Publications. Melamed, J. (2015). Racial Capitalism. Critical Ethnic Studies, 1(1), 76–85.

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Mitchell, W. J. T. (2012). Seeing Through Race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rawls, J. (1999). A Theory of Justice (Rev. ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Robinson, C. (2000). Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (first published in 1983). Chapel Hill: University of California Press. Sivanandan, A. (2006). Race, Terror and Civil Society. Race & Class, 47 (3), 1–8. Stoler, A. L. (2008). Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination. Cultural Anthropology, 23(2), 191–219. Wallerstein, I. (2009). Reading Fanon in the 21st century. New Left Review, 57, 117–125. Wolfe, P. (2001). Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures or Race. The American Historical Review, 106(3), 866–905.

PART III

Symptom

CHAPTER 8

Pre-truth, Post-truth and the Present: Jacques Lacan and the Real Horror of Contemporary Knowledge Scott Wilson

Truth and Post-truth The truth, it seems fair to say, isn’t what it used to be. This is a hackneyed truism I’ll return to in due course (and it’s worth noting that this discussion may very well feature similar truisms, oxymorons and tautologies) but for now, a brief examination of the state of truth in the world of public discourse. By this I mean the world of publicly circulated knowledge statements, made by those who occupy the positions of power that enable access to the means to propagate such statements, made in relation to affective responses to extra-subjective events. But even this seemingly careful elaboration of what is being discussed isn’t quite subtle enough to capture all that is at play here—which is the point, of course—but it’s a starting point and, for now, that is enough. The example du jour of post-truth is, of course, Donald Trump, currently—as of this writing—the 45th president of the United States of America. Again, as of this writing, President Trump has averaged 7.6 lies,

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untruths or misleading claims per day of his presidency (Kessler et al. 2018), a figure that alters with such rapidity that I will assume that by the time of publication it will have long been superseded. Leonhardt and Thompson’s 2017 article in the New York Times, now an ongoing and regularly updated feature, records and fact-checks Trump’s struggles with the truth, noting that Trump told a public lie or falsehood every day for the first 40 days of his presidency, thereafter settling down into a more regular pattern wherein “on days without an untrue statement, he is often absent from Twitter, vacationing at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, or busy golfing” (Leonhardt and Thompson 2017). Necessarily, the manner with which one counts such egregious sins depends on the manner with which one defines truth, and Leonhardt and Thompson have duly noted that while “every president has shaded the truth or told occasional whoppers […] No other president—of either party—has behaved as Trump is behaving. He is trying to create an atmosphere in which reality is irrelevant” (2017). Thus, they conclude that even if we generously admit that some of Trump’s epistemological shifts were errors, “… it would be the height of naïveté to imagine he is merely making honest mistakes. He is lying” (2017). However, post-truth is more than lying, and lying is only a part of posttruth. Trump’s discourse is taken by many to represent something significant, something in relation to the role of truth in public discourse and, consequently, the manner with which that discourse might have real world consequences and results; the concern of those who align themselves in opposition to Trump and his analogues is that to alter truth in its relationship to the events it describes is to alter the world that emerges because of the circulation of that truth. Truth, then, is intimately related to power and, certainly, the power to act (or not) and the power to define what constitutes truth is evidence of a particular kind of self-interested power over the world, and power over those subject to that world-view, those whose fate is to inhabit that discourse without a say, or a hand, or voice, in its creation and circulation. In 2016, the adjective ‘post-truth’ was nominated as the Oxford Dictionary ‘Word of the Year’ and defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief” (Oxford Dictionaries 2016). One of the factors that appears to have led to the dubious success of the term is its use now in popular media without definition, evidence of its having been adopted so thoroughly as to become a naturalized citizen of disseminated discourse. Other applicants for the 2016 ‘word of the year’

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are aligned with a similar shift in epistemological alignment; ‘brexiteer’, ‘adulting’ and ‘woke’ all refer to changes in power-identity-ontological relations but are too limited in their use to have succeeded as a general descriptor for the overwhelming shift in public, and especially political, discourse towards the current situation represented by Trump’s public and social media utterances. But has it always been ever so, where transparent truth, faithful to objectivity and rationality, must remain vigilant in the face of such obvious pretenders as post-truth, whose falsehood is visible to anyone aligned correctly with knowledge and its discourses? Of course the answer is ‘no’, but not just in the way that contemporary critical discourses would suggest, insofar as in this postmodern era truth is necessarily subjective, etc. Instead, I believe it is possible to more fully interrogate this situation by examining not just the ontological or, perhaps, epistemological conditions within which truth might occur in order to deliver information about the world and its contents (although this is important) but, with Jacques Lacan as our guide, to consider the development of governing ontologies themselves, those knowledge structures that then make possible the conditions for truth, untruth and post-truth to occur. The threat of post-truth, it would seem, is not just that it offers subjective whim as objective reportage, but that it threatens, undermines even, a whole host of previously unquestioned discursive structures whose seeming immutability points only to their previous success and not their inevitability. And yet, what I seek to examine in this chapter is the suspicious straightforwardness of this assumption; that post-truth is somehow an assault on the possibilities for truth that, prior to post-truth, were stable and equally available to all. Instead, what we see is that for at least one epistemological site where truth might conceivably be thought of as guaranteed, the evolution of discourse regarding the value of the museum demonstrates that truth, if it is to be embodied and rendered visible in a collection of curated objects, has never been so clear or so stable as our contemporary anxieties might suggest. Thus in the pages to come I seek to explore the development of the contemporary museum from its past forms into the edifice we recognize today, to lay that development alongside Lacan’s theories of subject-formation, and then to demonstrate that the relationship between truth and post-truth is not so clear, nor so linear, as we might think (or wish it) to be. In this way we shall see how the seemingly inevitable or immutable discourses of truth themselves evolve and come to understand why both appeals and threats to truth cut so deeply and strike so hard, for they are nothing less than threats to identity and subjectivity.

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The Prehistory of the Museum If our contemporary rational knowledge economy has moments in which early examples of our own methods of acquiring and managing information about the world can be seen in their primitive forms, then one of them must be with the publication of Carl Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae of 1735. At this moment, the natural world is ordered in a way that will become, for us, inevitable, transparent, perhaps even natural itself. Indeed, is this not the mark of an effective articulation of these discourses that they become the very fabric of reality and—of course—knowledge, without the support of which any other form or genealogy of knowledge must therefore be suspect. However, Linnaeus’ attempt to provide a systematic taxonomy of all living things was “… basically a methodical ordering of the categories that had been suggested by tradition or ‘common sense’” (Sax 2013, p. 37). Hence, for example, his decision to categorize bats as, first, mice with wings, then primates and, finally, within their own order where they have safely remained since. The Systema Naturae marks a movement towards a rational—i.e.: recognizably modern—ordering of the world and, during this period and across the emerging fields of the sciences, similar orderings are taking place throughout Europe, the better to classify, structure and govern the previously ungovernable or differently governed. However, perhaps the best example of this development, the emergence of interlinked fields and categories that govern the experience of reality and the relationship between things, objects, peoples, lies in the trajectory of the Kunst- and Wunderkammer (or ‘art’- and ‘wonder chambers’), from highly individual collections to strictly ordered, if bafflingly imprecise (to contemporary eyes), gatherings of objects and elements, through to the modern museum in its objective, rational and utterly transparent form as we currently recognize it. The museum is the contemporary guarantor of truth par excellence and, both as an example of, and a contributor to our modern Symbolic Register (about which more, soon), it appears to have always been as it currently is, while having evolved from a pre-history that it appears now to be more of the Imaginary than the Symbolic and, as we shall see, is evolving still. The Wunder and Kunstkammern flourished in Europe between the sixteenth and eighteenth century, representing the ordering principles of their times and societies, the drive towards categorization and what we recognize now as a pre-scientificism that is both familiar to us for what these collections would evolve into, and faintly ridiculous, perhaps naive, for the

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assumptions, beliefs and doxa they encode. Originally private collections of objects that, for a variety of reasons, were considered significant for their literal and allegorical possibilities, the Kammern could be dedicated cabinets but their collections were as likely to fill entire rooms, floors and, later, buildings with their extensive holdings, the better to demonstrate the reach and power of the collection’s owner. For the collectors of these objects, and equally for those who would encounter them as often-overwhelming spectacles of display, these Kammern would reveal not so much “an actual material world so much as [the] desire to understand, to listen, to see, to be enchanted” (Schnapp 2013, p. 144). However, the Kammern were more than merely passive receptacles of exotica: as a broadly pan-European practice, they would come to stand for world-ordering schemata and their evolution both drives and reflects concomitant changes in the major scientific discourses during their period of activity. These cabinets, from their conception, were designed to engage in two separate discourses: the first, most obviously, concerned the Kammern as a concrete example of the power of the collector over the material world. In many cases, the larger collections of royalty and nobility, which would in turn become the foundations of the major European museums, functioned as exhibitions of their owners’ wealth, political power and military might, evidenced in the wealth and range of goods on display. The second discourse—more important for our discussion—concerned the ability of the collector, and thus the collection, to catalogue nature and the natural world. As attempts to gather as diverse a collection of representative objects as possible, these examples of “… innate human curiosity represented a bridge in time leading back to, or beyond, the blissful state of knowledge that had existed prior to the Fall of humanity’s primeval ancestors” (Bredekamp 1995, p. 40). By placing diverse collections of objects together in order for them to be encountered in this, often overwhelming, fashion, “there is a ‘staging’ that occurs that transforms them from the accidental to the intentional” (Cleary 2014, p. 122) and it was this which made possible an observation of links between objects, the better for humanity to reacquire its lost prelapsarian wisdom. The then-dominant conception of naturalis historia [natural history], developed by Pliny the Elder between 77 and 79AD “embraced the description of the given state of natural things or species, rather than their evolution” (Bredekamp 1995, p. 7), a discourse favoured by the Church because this limited concept of ‘history’ was in full accord with the Biblical narrative of creation. This discourse was challenged by Immanuel Kant’s division of

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Pliny’s concept into descriptive and historical components, allowing for the distinguishing between how things are and how they might once have been. With Kant’s 1775 work to expand the concept of naturalis historia, history—as we understand it today—could be introduced into the study of nature. Kant writes: Natural history – which is virtually non-existent in a historical form – would teach us about changes in the structure of the earth and terrestrial creatures (plants and animals) over the course of their natural migrations and about the ensuing mutations from the prototypes of species. (Kant quoted in Bredekamp 1995, p. 8)

Changes in concepts of history, including the recognition over change in the natural world over time as both something that occurs and as something worth recording, therefore necessarily led to changes in the manner with which both the natural world and objects of human construction would be collected, catalogued and understood. The second purpose of the Kammern was to demonstrate visibly the power of the collector over the visible and invisible world. “For emperors and nobility, active participation in research and the processing of materials […] meant clear evidence of their absolute rule, emphasizing not only their representative dignity but also—and in particular—their active control of the outside world” (Bredekamp 1995, p. 53). In this fashion, the Kammern therefore represent the articulation of power over knowledge, both in the manner with which individual sovereignty is confirmed by owning a Kammer with objects from one’s terrestrial holdings, but also because the evolving structures of categorization enacted by collectors within their Kammern would govern the manner with which the sciences, in particular, would emerge in their contemporary forms. The first Kammern were loose collections of objects gathered and held with no attempt at an organizational logic beyond the demonstration of the power of the collector to have obtained them. Indeed, the prehistory of the Kammern reaches back to collections of exotic objects held by wealthy Romans, Greeks and Babylonians, among others. Yet, by the mideighteenth century, shifts in discourse as evidenced above with reference to Kant and Linneaus were replicated in the manner with which collectors began to organize, standardize and catalogue their collections. No longer could the unicorn’s horn sit comfortably against the fossil, the unpolished precious stone against the exotic pottery. Instead, the focus became on the

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ways in which the collection might be utilized to demonstrate the historicization of nature and of humanity as a part of this wider historical scope. Indeed, this desire had been a part of the Kammern collections for some time—although for different ends. Thus ancient sculpture—which was, in the sixteenth century, often categorized as fossils because, like fossils, they were usually extracted from the earth—were equally considered to be the products of human agency and of nature (Bredekamp 1995, p. 11). This could allow the collector to compare these treasures from the ground to contemporary sculpture, either to show that the more modern work was the superior of the ancients or to demonstrate the opposite, depending on the particular kinds of discourse being exemplified in the collection. The development of these categorizing discourses over the period of the Kammern, reaching their zenith in the mid-eighteenth century, is similarly replicated in the general trend to organize these collections into categories whose logic would lead inexorably towards the foundations of the major museums who would, in turn, strip the major Kammern of their holdings. Thus, the Kunstkammer of Francesco I de’Medici, which grew in size and status between 1540 and 1740, and the guide to collecting written by Samuel Quiccheberg, published in 1565, both functioned as models of how the division of the collection into categories might serve multiple ends. Together they offered the following divisions as a guide to organizing Kammern: • The ruler and his realm, which linked God’s plan for human salvation with the actions of the Kammern’s owner and benefactor. • Arts and crafts, moving from ancient to modern, local to exotic. • The three kingdoms of nature; animal, vegetable and mineral. • Technology and anthropology, including toys, surgical, musical and writing instruments, costumes and jewellery. • A final section dedicated to panel painting, including oils, watercolours, engravings and tapestries. Bredekamp notes that these divisions are, to contemporary eyes, unbalanced in that they divide attention between sections that celebrate the ruler and his holdings, and those which place humanity in a wider spiritual context; descriptions of current practices, and those which seek to explore the evolution of practices; the description of nature, and moments where an

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attempt to demonstrate change within nature is evidenced. Yet to understand the wider function of these competing discourses involves seeing them both as attempts to reconcile historically aligned ways of understanding the role of humans in God’s wider plan with the emerging discourses of science, history (or historiography) and rationalism. The function of the Kammern are increasingly, in this period, split between competing discourses and ideologies, which is what makes them so useful as a way of marking the transition from the earlier Kammern towards the singular focus of the modern museum. Later Kammern would start to apply different hierarchies in their ordering. The collection of Archduke Ferdinand of the Tyrol, started in 1573, included a series of buildings whose holdings worked to demonstrate the myriad ways in which natural objects might be transformed via art and technology, with the wider collection organized roughly around the contemporary understanding of the historical periods from which the objects came, in order to better demonstrate the superiority of the more modern works. The Prague Kunstkammer of Emperor Rudolf II, started in the early seventeenth century, rearranged the order of earlier collections to place naturalia (specimens from the natural world) first, followed by artificialia (or arts and crafts) next, with scientifica (instruments of the sciences) last. Exotica (or the exotic), previously a category of its own, was now woven through the other categories so that where, once, this category might have demonstrated the wish or ability to subjugate those indigenous others to the European ideal, the integration of this category demonstrates the early signs of a form of ethnology and anthropology that was more humane in its desire (if not realized in its articulation) to understand the breadth of the human species. In fits and starts, as the discourses surrounding the ways in which the Europeans might understand the world and their place within it evolved towards their modern forms, so too did the categorization of natural and artificial objects in the Kunst and Wunderkammern evolve to reflect this shifting understanding. In the same way, as these collections became gradually available to wider populations, through invitation, then public exhibition, so too did they contribute to revisions of thought and understanding. Kant’s expansion of Pliny occurred because the discourses around the relationship of time to nature were changing, and these changes were visible in the ways in which the arbiters of these great collections of objects begin to adjust their categories and orderings. Thus these discursive shifts are not without precedent; they demonstrate the ways in which the relationship

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between the emerging fields of scientific, anthropological and museological practice both reflect and influence the wider engagements with thought. Equally important to consider is the kind of subjectivity that might emerge in relation to these developing systems of knowledge and authority and, particularly, knowledge in relation to authority. For while the earliest Kammern might have served as mere spectacles of individual power and influence, the later collections would become, in many cases, the foundations of the great museums and the bedrock upon which contemporary thinking might evolve.

Jacques Lacan and the Subject in Society Having too-briefly summarized the ways in which that edifice of truth—the museum—came to be as we see it now, it is time to consider both the ways psychoanalysis gives the means to consider the emergence of subjectivity in an individual, and the way that this development appears to match the genealogy of the museum itself. For the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the infant, prior to the acquisition of language, moves towards subjectivity as it encounters its specular image, either in a mirror or reflected in the actions of its caregivers. As he explains in his 1949 essay ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’, this image, always more coherent and cohesive than the infant feels internally, is the site of aggressive identification from which a subjectivity emerges in the act of self-recognition and against which the infant will, forever more, assess itself. Lacan would explain that “[t]he child does not exteriorize itself. It does not project itself in an image. Rather, the reverse occurs. The child is constituted in conformity to and by means of the image” (Julien 1994, p. 32). The specular image is the fantasy of the subject-yet-to-be; however the infant is not free to decide upon the constitution of its own imaginary. The imaginary, central to our subjectivities, is structured and governed by the manner with which it overlaps and intersects the symbolic. Lacan (2006) writes that: Symbols in fact envelop the life of man [sic] in a network so total that they join together, before he comes into the world, those who are going to engender him … (p. 231)

The Symbolic register, thus, “is best conceived as a structure in which intersubjective communication occurs. It can also be understood as a field of

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intersubjective human ‘reality’” (Flisfeder 2012, pp. 27–28). Lacan underscores the centrality of the Symbolic when he explains: It’s only from the moment of entrance of the subject into an order which preexists to all that happens to him [sic], events, satisfactions, disappointments, that all in which he approaches his experience […] falls into an order, is articulated, takes its meaning, and can be analyzed. (quoted in Silhol 2009)

We can therefore see that Lacan’s “symbolic order […] denotes the domain where symbols are used, or, to put it more strongly, the fact that one can only express oneself symbolically” (Silhol 2009, emphasis in original). Thus the child is born into the social setting which will provide the template for its development and subjectivity and, within these pre-existing networks, come to an identity that it believes is singular and unique but which emerges as a result of the interaction of those elements that surround and prefigure it. This then is the paradox of Lacan’s model of subjectivity insofar as it renders teleology moot with the notion that the Imaginary register—the site of the specular image of primary identification—is structured prior to the advent of the infant by the Symbolic, which the infant will not access until it surrenders the possibilities of the Imaginary before the paternal metaphor and gains, as a result, both language and entry into the Symbolic fold. Yet there is a logic at work here: the Imaginary is structured, governed and contained by the Symbolic and it is through the Imaginary that the infant reaches the possibilities of exteriority (communication with others, for example) made possible by the Symbolic. The interrelationship of the Imaginary and the Symbolic is clear at this moment, once the infant is inserted into the circuit in order to illustrate it and the process of moving from the Imaginary to a subjective situation where the Imaginary is mediated and governed by entry into the Symbolic is one of stages, as Bailly (2012) explains: The gaining of access to the Symbolic happens in quantum leaps: the first being the pre-language access to ideational-representatives, as demonstrated in Freud’s baby playing with a bobbin, and uttering ‘fort-da’ in accompaniment to a game of loss and retrieval. The second leap occurs at the Mirror Stage. [….] The completion of the individual’s initiation into the Symbolic

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comes with the acceptance of the Name-of-the-Father,1 and of castration. (pp. 84–85)

But what is also clear is that the image the infant encounters is the one that will best reflect it, according to the requirements of the Symbolic that surrounds and renders the Imaginary possible: as Julien (1994) makes clear, “… from the outset, the Symbolic superimposes itself upon the Imaginary and determines it” (p. 48). Necessarily, entry into the Symbolic is a high-stakes game; subjectivity as we experience it emerges as a result of a successful passage across the ambivalences of the Mirror Stage and an equally successful integration (Bailly refers to it as an acceptance) of the power of the Name-of-the-Father over the individual’s desire and access to satisfaction. The result of this is, for our argument, the recognition that the Imaginary both precedes and prefigures the child’s entry into the Symbolic and the possibilities of the Imaginary will be those that are most in accord with the requirements of the Symbolic register at that place and time. This enormously intricate, interconnected field, within which the individual comes to subjectivity and through which it is connected, via language, to other individuals, pre-exists our entry into it and might therefore seem natural, immutable, inevitable. Yet it might be more accurate to consider the existence of multiple Symbolic registers and to equally consider the manner with which any given symbolic register will alter over time, rendering possible and adjusting to shifts in desire and satisfaction. For if it is the case that “… the child is inscribed in a symbolic universe that determines its place, [and] subordinates the imaginary …” (Julien 1994, p. 50) in order to determine an image with which the child eventually identifies, then it must also be the case that the constitution of these images have both changed over time, and are markedly different in different social and cultural settings. So, rather than a monolithic Symbolic register that functions equally for all subjects, we must recognize the existence of Symbolic dialects, which function in the same ways and to the same ends but which articulate their symbolic interactions in different ways. With his exploration of the Symbolic Register, Lacan is borrowing from Claude Levi-Strauss’ notion of 1 It is important to clarify that for Lacan, the Name-of-the-Father does not refer to a specif-

ically male (or even masculine) figure but to a discourse whose prohibitive and regulatory functions act as a (clichéd) father might. Indeed, as Alan Badiou and Elisabeth Roudinesco (2014) remark “…the aforementioned symbolic function of the father can be assumed as much by a woman as by a man, and in a homosexual couple, by one or the other partner. There are so many ways to form a family, and none should be excluded a priori!” (p. 25).

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symbolic use as a way of considering structural similarities between cultures, and the possible existence of varieties of the Symbolic allow us the means to consider the specific superficial differences between cultures (and smaller groups) while also recognizing that the same kinds of organizing principles and structural processes are being followed in both individual and group constitution. With so much invested in this process (again, nothing less than subjectivity itself), it becomes clear that as much as we must surrender to the Symbolic in order to gain access to what it provides, so too must the Symbolic we have entered be protected from threats to itself, lest those threats strike at the core of our hard-won subjectivities and the architectures of desire and satisfaction that surround us. Again, Bailly makes clear that “[i]n its primary function, therefore, the Subject exists in the realm of the Symbolic” (p. 85) while Ehsan Azari (2008) further explains that the result of this location of the subject in the Symbolic is that “[t]he entrance to the symbolic bestows upon the subject a status of an existence that remains being-less. The subject is thus an effect of the signifier and exists only in language as the symbolic function for desire” (p. 16). This means that with the subjective pan-individual existence that is granted with the surrender of the individual’s Imaginary to the social Symbolic, so too is the subject’s relationship to desire affected and realigned. Lacan further clarifies that, for the social subject, “human desire is the function of the desire of the Other” (2014, p. 325), by which he means both that all desire is of the subject for things that are not it (or other to it), and, equally, all desire is for what the subject supposes the Other (which is not it) wants. This realignment of desire from the private circuits of the Imaginary to the social trajectories of the Symbolic is one of the ways in which the subject is forcefully connected to the external world and those other subjects that inhabit it. This is not to suggest, however, that the Imaginary diminishes in significance as a result of this location of subjectivity (at least as it is socially experienced) in the Symbolic and I believe it is possible to link the vehemence of response to the actions of Post-Truth to the individual subject’s alignment with that register, as well as to the desire, however unconscious, to protect the subject’s Symbolic from either attack or, perhaps worse, irrelevance. The Symbolic Register, here expanded towards the consideration of multiple, simultaneous registers, hinges on the general stability of a Master Signifier, a specific unit of meaning whose presence will hold chains of signification together. Usually signifiers point to other signifiers, signs to other signs, but the Master Signifier points only to itself and is void of meaning

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because of its centrality; it is the signifier that doesn’t need defining because of its obviousness, its inevitability. Thus, in a discourse of truth, Master Signifiers would be those sites, locations or knowledges whose truthfulness is taken as read and unquestioned, and from which truth about the world, for example, will proceed. The Museum, then, is just such a Master Signifier within this argument to question the truth of the Museum is to shake the foundations of knowledge. Yet the unquestionable access to, and representation of, truth found in the contemporary museum emerges over time and evolves in tandem with the related scientific discourses of the early modern era, emerging from the spectacles and fantasy of the first Kammern and shifting through the experiments in organization and hierarchy, the mixing of the natural and artificial, local and exotic, ancient and modern that typifies the evolution of the Kammern in the familiar collections of the museum. Again, it is Bredekamp who comments: The Kunstkammern did not offer merely a link between artifacts from historically, geographically, and ethnically foreign cultures and all realms of nature; they also provided an opportunity for experimentation in merging form and meaning … . (p. 110)

Just as the museum functions as a site we can visit—both actually and discursively—in order to find an authority we can trust and from whom is issued truth, so too is its truth part of the contemporary Symbolic register with the concept of the museum (as the site of unquestionable truth) as the Master Signifier that anchors this particular chain of signification. Yet, as has been made clear, the truth of the museum, as we recognize it today, had to emerge over time to become the stable location of meaning that it currently is.

The Return of the (Temporarily) Repressed: The Contemporary Kammern How then are we to explain the recent turn (or return) to the Kammer as an organizational principle for exhibitions, collections and art works? For Silke Dettmers (2008), Wonder has no opposite and it thus jars with the idea of proof. Wonder […] prioritizes the senses, it is populated by images, it is non-judgmental and nonhierarchal; wonder is a state before words and reason—all of which drives it

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to the margins of academic credibility. Wonder, in method and spirit, is the antithesis of the institution. (pp. 40–41)

This list, however breathless, does perfectly illustrate the ways in which wonder, and the Kammern as deliberate articulations of wonder, work to confound a Symbolic oriented towards the support of those criteria of the institution (judgement; hierarchy; words and reason; academic credibility) for, as Dettmers continues, “the currency of universities and academies is knowledge. A knowledge that, in the West, is closely related to reason, proof and the elimination of uncertainty and doubt” (p. 41). So the return of the Kammer as a principle of organization and, thus, knowledge representation (if not knowledge generation) runs counter to the Symbolic structures that currently dominate those institutions in the West. Yet the impulses for order rendered specific and private, as demonstrated by Wunder- and Kunstkammern both large and small, were never entirely superseded and the standardizing practices of the modern museum and its analogues could only ever be the public front of other, smaller and more intimate practices. Thus even as the major metropolitan museums would develop, consolidate (often by integrating the materials of the older Kammern into their collections) and thereafter engage in the construction and circulation of discourses of knowledge with regards their holdings, smaller sites of local knowledge would continue. Folk museums, for example, continue the tradition of the Wunderkammer with the irreverent mixing of categories and objects depending on the specific local situation but share, with their national or metropolitan cousins “…ways of imagining communities and representing nations” (Jordan 2010, p. 25). As noted in an early issue of the journal Folklore (1948), such museums … contain collections, or some isolated objects, illustrating rural material culture, local manufactures, obsolete (not merely obsolescent) domestic and agricultural tools and implements. Sometimes exhibits relating to the folklore of the district are included and these may be records, sketches or photographs of local customs and rituals. They are often combined with collections illustrating the natural history, geology, archaeology or arts and crafts of the district in which they are situated. (p. 48)

Folk museums are diverse and, at times, unruly, but contain both the desire to transmit knowledge about authentic experience (hence the focus on the specifically local for many, if not most, folk museums) and the need to

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make sense of their collections in relation to a wider ontological framework. Again, here these smaller collections are engaging in national ideological activity in the same way as the standard contemporary national or metropolitan museums, but, for many of them, the arrangement of the objects and the subsequent interpretative practices these arrangements suggest (both of the objects themselves, and of the objects in relation to their local contexts) mirrors the work of the earlier Kammern where the knowledge produced refers back to the local situation or to the collectors themselves. We might equally acknowledge the return of the Kammer as an organizing principle for a wide range of contemporary exhibitions and collections, from organizations as diverse as the Museum of Modern Art with their 2008 exhibition ‘Wunderkammer: A Century of Curiosities’ and the University of North Carolina’s 2014 exhibition ‘From Wunderkammer to Museum: 1565–1865’, itself organized as a Wunderkammer. Other examples from a growing list of major exhibitions that utilize the Kammern as a governing strategy include: ‘Wunderkammer: The Artificial Kingdom’ (2005: curated by Edward Allington and Jeremy Webster at the New Curtois Gallery); ‘Wunderkammer Exhibition’ (2015: curated by Rod McCrae at the Australian National Trust’s Tasma Terrace site); ‘Wunderkammer’ (2011: curated by Phillip March Jones at the Conduit Gallery in Dallas, Texas); ‘Wunderkammer. Arte, Natura, Meraviglia ieri e oggi’ (‘Wunderkammer. Art, Nature, Wonder Yesterday and Today’) (2014: a joint exhibition of ancient contemporary works displayed at the Gallerie d’Italia in Piazza della Scala and the Museo Poldi Pezzoli in via Manzoni); and ‘Wunderkammer’ (2012: curated by David Chipperfield at 13th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale). Finally, Mark Dion’s Tate Museum exhibition, ‘Digging the Thames’ (1999) was a collection of material dug from the banks of the Thames and arranged in a nonlinear, ahistorical fashion within a large wooden cabinet and a series of wooden chests. The exhibition’s catalogue notes, in specific reference to Dion’s work but in a way that applies equally to all contemporary Kammern exhibitions: “The lack of historical categorisation suggests a subversion of standard museological practice. Viewers are free to create their own associations, to trace histories across time, not necessarily in a linear direction” (Fiske and Bottinelli 2002). Usefully, the catalogue continues by explaining that Dion’s work—and, by extension, all contemporary Kammern—

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are informed by [or in turn reflect] the writings of Stephen Jay Gould, the contemporary evolutionary theorist, who points out that taxonomic systems do not provide objective criteria but are contingent upon our value systems and thus rooted within our social structures. (Fisk and Bottinelli 2002)

With reference to the growing international interest in the use of the Kammern, James Putnam further explains that “It is this apparent lack of rational classification, with its bizarre sense of accumulation and juxtaposition, that makes the Wunderkammer concept aesthetically so appealing” (Putnam 2001, p. 8). Yet the return of the Kammern (if, in fact, it ever really went away) is more than “fuck-you attitudinizing” (Roberts 1996, p. 16) or an infantile ignoring of the role of the contemporary governing Symbolic. And while Roberts is writing specifically about the Young British Artists of the 1990s, including Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, his point about the wider symbolic significance of their art can be applied equally here. Emin’s ‘My Bed’ (1998) and Hirst’s vitrine-like taxidermied works (including ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’ [1991] and ‘Away from the Flock’ [1994]) both point to the utilization of the knowledge structures of the academy in order to critique or subvert them. Thus informed, we might finally also consider those artists for whom the Kammern principle provides the means to suggest, and at times enforce, multiple interpretations that hinge on the private associations audience members might make when confronted with arrangements of objects whose organizational logic is occluded. Joseph Cornell’s assemblages, influenced by the Surrealists, have themselves influenced a wide range of contemporary practitioners. Franco Clivio’s photographs, Alex Rizkalla own assemblages or Maissa Toulet’s vitrine-like collections all echo Cornell’s practice and reference the private intentions of the Kammern rather than the publicly shared directives of the Symbolic structures of the Museum.

The Museum, the Subject and Truth The reintroduction or re-emergence of the Kammer, now understood as a way of organizing objects according to either private desire or the potential for spectacle, stands in ready opposition to the ordered scientifism of the museum, and marks also a return of the discourse of the Kammern that was itself (however temporarily) superseded. The truth of the museum, it would seem, evolves, and here I refer not to only the content of specific collections or exhibitions but, instead, the broader discursive structures

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within which individual epistemes might be located and acknowledged. Yet the Kammern were never without their own logic and order and, as such, I believe it is incorrect to claim that either the early or more recent Kammern “had little interest in order and categorization” (Dettmers 2008, p. 41). Instead, the governing logic of the historical Kammer was the rigorous logic of the individual collector that would, like the Imaginary of the subject, eventually have to give way to the wider pan-subjective Symbolic and, as a result of that acquiescence, gain the respectability and discursive stability that the contemporary museum has enjoyed ever since. Yet, the Kammern continue to provide difference and offer alternatives that, in their way, are equally as rigorous and are as equally oriented towards similar conclusions regarding the articulation of power over knowledge, and the aligning of both with ideology. Thus informed, we can return to consider post-truth and the various threats made to truth and, subsequently, rationalism and knowledge as a result of the rise of post-truth and its associated discourses. To claim, as Tony Blair once famously did, that “I only know what I believe” (Wright 2004) is to make a claim for the privately organized subject in the face of a wider social Symbolic register, to prioritize individual agency over the structures of modern knowledge that would previously have utilized, as we have seen, judgement, hierarchy, words and reason and academic credibility as arbiters of knowledge. For contemporary commentators, post-truth is nothing less than an attack on the very foundations of civil society, such that, as Matthew d’Ancoma exclaims, post-truth is … what happens when a society relaxes its defence of the values that underpin its cohesion, order and progress: the values of veracity, honesty and accountability. (d’Ancoma, quoted in Lloyd 2017)

And so, to clumsily paraphrase a particularly apposite piece of art, ‘Just what is it that makes today’s truths so different, so appealing?’. Here, I think just a single example will suffice for, even before his election, President Trump was pushing the limits of truth into (at least seemingly) new terrain with his first television commercial. The 2016 advertisement’s voice over (with suitably stern, san-serif titles) announces that Trump will “call for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States until we can figure out what’s going on”, ‘quickly cut the head off ISIS and take their oil’ and will “stop illegal immigration by building a wall at our southern border that Mexico will pay for” (Wall Street Journal 2012). Accompanying these

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statements are shots of cruise missiles being launched from a ship at sea and footage, shot from a distance, of large numbers of people streaming across an unnamed border crossing in what appears to be a desert. The implication in this final section of the commercial is clearly that this border and border fence are ‘our southern border’, and it is upon these kinds of representations and discourses that the Trump campaign slouched towards the Bethlehem of its success. Immediately the advertisement garnered the kinds of opprobrium it deserved, for the alarming footage of distant bodies careening across a stretch of open land towards a group of fences actually shows illegal immigration, as NBC reported, not from Mexico into the United States but of “Moroccans crossing the border into Melilla and was shown on Italian network RepubblicaTV in May 2014” (Vitali et al. 2016). The original footage, when broadcast by RepubblicaTV, was timestamped and watermarked with the station’s logo; both of these are absent when the footage appears in the Trump commercial. As a result of these careful manipulations, the website Politifact—a Pulitzer Prize-winning group of factchecking journalists—rated the Trump commercial as ‘Pants on Fire’ for circulating such egregious untruths (Emery Jr. and Jacobson 2016). Contained in this first moment of Trump’s campaign are the discursive tropes that would typify everything that his government has undertaken since with regard to the notion of truth and its relationship to those structures that authorize discourse, and, as I made clear above, here I’m not referring to outright lies but those other more problematic forms of articulation. The specific content of this advertisement, and the manner with which these embryonic statements would go on to function as continuous touchstones for the next years of Trump’s presidency, are less important than the way they function to illustrate how the Symbolic and Imaginary interact, revealing their role both in the formation of the subject, and the manner with which discursive structures that are authorized by the Symbolic and which draw upon the Imaginary, in turn authorize the utterances of the Symbolic by appearing to agree with them. That the commercial contains blatant untruths is not quite beyond question, for it is important to note that these untruths exist not within specific moments in the commercial but in the manner with which different utterances combine in ways that have become ordinarily inevitable as a result of the mechanisms of moving image media. By this I mean that the text and voice, which announce an aggressive approach to the doom-laden threats of illegal immigration across ‘our’ southern border, and the images which show people moving across

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a landscape (let along the fact that the images have the long-distance hazy black-and-white blur of surveillance camera footage, all long-established tropes of documentary authenticity) are designed to be read together, as co-informing, and yet also exist independently and, as demonstrated, have entirely different provenance. Thus when the Trump campaign was immediately censured over this collision of image, text and sound, they were able to claim that this congruence had been deliberately engineered, according to Time Magazine, not to mislead but “to demonstrate the severe impact of an open border and the very real threat Americans face if we do not immediately build a wall and stop illegal immigration” (White 2016). Clearly, the message is that the image/text relationship is to be taken literally until it isn’t, or taken literally only until such time as it is revealed as a deliberate construction, after which it should be understood as a warning of what might happen at ‘our’ southern border, not what is happening. To be fair, I’m leaning into this specific moment in the advertisement because the notion of the border wall remains one of Trump’s fascinations, but the commercial is rife with such statements and therein lies the point. There are no untruths here—no direct or deliberate lies are uttered in this commercial, unlike innumerable others of Trump’s communications—but the discursive value of these constructions is immediate because, first, they conform to, and confirm, long-held beliefs by the kinds of voters being sought (successfully, as it turns out) and, as the march to the White House gathered speed, the claims could be made without need for verification because they were uttered by someone who increasingly appeared to be, for the voters being gathered, the Subject-Supposed-to-Know. As with the Kammern we have examined above, it is the association and congruence of specific pieces of information and the manner of their arrangement which generates, indeed directs, interpretation towards the targets decided in advance by the owner of the collection. In effect, the collective untruth of the commercial (i.e.: the border footage designed to be read as though it was ‘ours’ and which turns out not to be) becomes post-truth at the moment when the definitive interpretation becomes irrelevant and can be replaced with another, which will serve until it too is irrelevant and can be replaced, with no interpretation ultimately affecting the status and power of the original utterance. Throughout the campaign and, now, the long years of Trump’s presidency, these utterances, as with the arrangements of carefully curated objects in a Kammern, could be made and then accepted by those they were directed at because they emerged from a site of authority regardless

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of the individual who occupied that site. By sitting in the White House the President occupies the position of the Subject-Supposed-to-Know, even to the point that while cynicism could be held about individual Presidents and their failings, this only served to further cement the idealized possibilities of the site as a location of truthfulness; if not this President, then the next one. For, as Lacan elsewhere explains, “When something has been said and said again enough times, it becomes part of a general awareness” (2009, p. 17) and here is the real threat of post-truth, as least from a largely (if loosely) Lacanian perspective: the repeating of falsehood as truth with such frequency and vehemence, and from such a position of power as seems to be the case with those figures most frequently charged with such practices, is a threat to truth because of the way convenient falsehood replaces truth with the irrelevance of the temporary and evanescent outburst. Harry Frankfurt usefully explores this slippage in his essay ‘On Bullshit’ (2005) when he explains that the problem with post-truth (for Frankfurt, posttruth is merely bullshit rendered polite) is that it is … grounded neither in a belief that it is true nor, as a lie must be, in a belief that it is not true. It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth— this indifference to how things really are—that I regard as of the essence of bullshit [and, hence, as post-truth]. (pp. 33–34, emphasis mine)

Post-truth is indifferent to the truth and this indifference is an act of rendering irrelevant both the content of the truth that is overcome or ignored, but also, and most crucially, the Symbolic structures that both authorize and profit from the conditions of truth remaining as they are. This then allows us to understand that the threat posed by the rise of post-truth (and an increased indifference to its presence and use by those affected by it, but who are also powerless to affect it in return) is a threat to any subjectivity formed, authorized and granted power in relation to the Symbolic register that is facing obsolescence. The full horror of post-truth for those who are horrified by it is that once truth is shown not to reside in some kind of extra-subjective site (like a contemporary museum, or the highest political office of a democratic global power) but instead to operate at the whim of whoever has access to the power to make and continuously revise such statements regardless of fact, then the pan-subjective Symbolic is seen to be the subject of an individual Imaginary (or, perhaps, an individual’s Imaginary) which immediately prevents or forestalls the fantasies of others, not least of which is the fantasy of accessing authority one’s self.

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Thus, the rise of post-truth is also a move away from the governing authoritative Symbolic towards a logic of individual desire that, as with the evolution of the Kammern or the development of the individual subject’s Imaginary, must eventually make room for whatever revised Symbolic emerges from this period of discursive realignment. Necessarily, such historical periods are enormously difficult for those who are aligned—be it discursively or subjectively—with the Symbolic structures that are undermined by their contemporary revision but, as we have seen, the Symbolic (as a governing structural mechanism) will not be replaced; only specific dialects of the Symbolic alter from moment to moment, situation to situation or context to context. In the end, the pre-truth of truth—the Kammern in relation to the museum, or the Imaginary in relation to the Symbolic—returns to become the post-truth of truth, a recognition of desire and spectacle as non-linear, irrational organizational principles capable of revealing other forms of knowledge—metaphorical, allegorical—that, previously banished by the emergence of the museum or in the face of the Symbolic, were never fully lost and which now wield power in the face of truth’s contemporary struggles. Similarly, at moments such as these, truth, that most immutable and seemingly obvious of categories, is rendered visible as one flexible and contingent discourse among many about the world, and not as a stable reflection of it.

References Azari, E. (2008). Lacan and the Destiny of Literature: Desire, Jouissance and the Sinthome in Shakespeare, Donne, Joyce and Ashbery. London: Continuum. Badiou, A., & Roudinesco, E. (2014). Jacques Lacan, Past and Present: A Dialogue. New York: Columbia University Press. Bailly, L. (2012). Lacan: A Beginner’s Guide. London: Oneworld Publications. Bredekamp, H. (1995). The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine: The Kunstkammer and the Evolution of Nature, Art and Technology (A. Brown, Trans.). Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers. Cleary, S. (2014). The Nature of Things: Reinterpreting the Still Life Genre in the Twenty First Century (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. Dettmers, S. (2008). On the Necessity of Wonder: How to Explain an Artwork to a Committee. Journal of Visual Art Practice, 7 (1), 37–55. Emery, Jr., C. E., & Jacobson, L. (2016). Donald Trump’s First TV Ad Shows Migrants ‘At the Southern Border,’ But They’re Actually in Morocco. Retrieved

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from https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jan/04/ donald-trump/donald-trumps-first-tv-ad-shows-migrants-southern-/. Fiske, T., & Bottinelli, G. (2002). ‘Tate Thames Dig’, Mark Dion, 1999. Retrieved from https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/dion-tate-thames-dig-t07669. Flisfeder, M. (2012). The Symbolic, the Sublime, and Slavoj Zizek’s Theory of Film. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Folk Museums. (1946). Folklore, 57 (1), 48. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org. libproxy.unitec.ac.nz/stable/1257004. Frankfurt, H. G. (2005). On Bullshit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jordan, J. A. (2010). Landscapes of European Memory: Biodiversity and Collective Remembrance. History & Memory, 22(2), 5–33. Retrieved from http:// libproxy.unitec.ac.nz:2048/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login. aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=53896163&site=ehost-live&scope=site. Julien, P. (1994). Jacques Lacan’s Return to Freud: The Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary. New York: New York University Press. Kessler, G., Rizzo, S., & Kelly, M. (2018, August 1). President Trump Has Made 4,229 False or Misleading Claims in 558 Days. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2018/08/ 01/president-trump-has-made-4229-false-or-misleading-claims-in-558-days/. Lacan, J. (2006). The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis. In B. Fink (trans.), Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English. New York: W.W. Norton. Lacan, J. (2009). My Teaching (J. Miller, Ed. & D. Macey, Trans.). London: Verso. Lacan, J. (2014). Anxiety: The seminar of Jacques Lacan (J. Miller, Ed. & A. R. Price, Trans.). Cambridge: Polity. Leonhardt, D., & Thompson, S. A. (2017, June 23). President Trump’s Lies, the Definitive List. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/ 06/23/opinion/trumps-lies.html. Lloyd, J. (2017, May 25). The Truth About the Post-truth Age. Retrieved 14 August 2018, from https://www.ft.com/content/53b00158-409c-11e782b6-896b95f30f58. Putnam, J. (2001). Art and Artifact: The Museum as Medium. London: Thames & Hudson. Roberts, J. (1996). Mad for It! Bank and the New British Art. Everything, 18, 15–19. Sax, B. (2013). Imaginary Animals: The Monstrous, the Wondrous and the Human. London: Reaktion Books. Schnapp, A. (2013). The Antiquarian, the Collector, and the Cultural History of the Material World. In P. N. Miller (Ed.), Cultural Histories of the Material World (pp. 144–150). Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.

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Silhol, R. (2009, October 5). But What Is Lacan’s Symbolic Order? Retrieved from http://psyartjournal.com/article/show/silhol-but_what_is_ lacans_symbolic_order. Tate. (2017, July 31). Digging the Thames with Mark Dion. Retrieved from http:// www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/dion-tate-thames-dig-t07669/diggingthames-mark-dion. Vitali, A., Tur, K., & Terrell, A. (2016, January 5). Trump Ad Fact Checked for Border Footage, Campaign Says ‘No S***’. NBC News. Retrieved from https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/trumpad-fact-checked-mexican-border-footage-campaign-says-no-n489981. Wall Street Journal. (2012). Donald Trump Releases First TV Ad [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qa3edsMzHkA. White, D. (2016, January 4). Here’s What’s Wrong With Donald Trump’s Campaign Ad. Time. Retrieved from http://time.com/4166931/donald-trumpscampaign-ad-shows-the-border-with-morocco/. Oxford Dictionaries. (2016, November 8). Word of the Year 2016 is…. Retrieved from https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year2016. Wright, G. (2004, September 28). Tony Blair’s Speech: Key Points. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/sep/28/labourconference. labour1.

CHAPTER 9

Civility, Subversion and Technocratic Class Consciousness: Reconstituting Truth in the Journalistic Field Olivier Jutel

The insurgency and ascent of right-wing populism globally has radically ruptured the liberal democratic and internationalist consensus that has been rhetorically constructed under neoliberalism. The experts and custodians of this consensus and attendant democratic processes, drawn from the fields of journalism, academia and politics, have been rendered impotent by the populist’s direct appeal to a mediatized public. The symbolic violence of Trump’s populist jouissance has rallied the professional class to reinscribe their definitional power over this series of disorienting political events. Thus fake news and Russian disinformation have become the central preoccupations of the journalistic field in staging a defence of its cultural capital and rearticulating its privileged position as arbiter of truth. The field’s investment in Russia-gate represents a disavowal of the political; externalizing the crisis on to a corrupting and subversive agent that can be

O. Jutel (B) University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 R. Overell and B. Nicholls (eds.), Post-Truth and the Mediation of Reality, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25670-8_9

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excised through the processes of truth-seeking and cyber-security analytics. It has thus fallen to a complex of journalists, academic research centres, think tanks and policy entrepreneurs to discern the hand of nefarious Russian influence behind all social forces that might disrupt the definitional power of professionals. The panic over fake news and Russian subversion perpetuates the post-political illusion of data-informed mastery over contingent political forces and “truth”, while simultaneously deploying the cultural capital of journalism, social science and academia towards digital censorship. This chapter will identify the contradictions of the journalistic field born of its claim to universal truth and its heteronomous position between fields. The designations “fake news” and “post-truth” rely upon the cultural capital of journalism as the profession which claims to unify the public around the mediation, witnessing and production of truth. The cultural capital of truth is what defines its autonomy from the broader field of power and infuses its routinized practices and habitus with an idealism of civic virtue. Journalistic truth functions as a meta-capital establishing the normative network of relations between fields with civility and consensus around truth functioning as the rules of the game. Politics is envisioned as rational, deliberative and civil processes that should ideally empower meritocratic professional and technocrats. However ubiquitous this cultural capital of truth, the field’s position across the field of power is derived from a heteronomous logic which draws all others into the production of data, online performativity and the economic logic of virality. Thus in Donald Trump we have a figure who is able to wield an affective media capital through an appeal to authenticity and populist jouissance. Trump’s precise embodiment of this heteronomous media logic and power has provoked a dramatic re-articulation of the field’s cultural capital. However as a figure who desires media capital above all else he manages to define the field in negative terms. His war against the media and daily outrages have proved a lucrative spectacle, while high cultural capital media such as The New York Times invoke the urgent necessity of their work. Mirroring Trump’s media war, the consumption of the Times, MSNBC or late night comedy become liberal acts of resistance. The exaltation of a broad liberal truth-seeking habitus functions as a drive and ritual that disavows the inadequacy of appeals to universal truth, absent an antagonistic political articulation. Faced with this crisis of autonomy in the profession an embattled journalistic habitus akin to Edward R. Murrow has emerged in staging a defence of American decency, the patriotic centre and civility. This battle

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is waged on a tired post-political terrain in order to avoid a political articulation of truth; what Bourdieu terms an ‘idée-force’ (2005, p. 39) that would force a traumatic confrontation with the field’s complicity. In the identity of “The Resistance” there is an articulation of an apolitical technocratic class of truth-seekers determined to uncover the depths of Russian subversion. These national security bureaucrats, “Never-Trump” Republicans and journalists invoke a cohesive patriotic “us” that is besieged by Trump’s disloyalty. Recasting the radical conjuncture of Trumpian populism as a question of fake news and subversion re-inscribes the field’s cultural capital in social science terms. The belief in a data-driven vantage above the chaotic forces of the social originates in the Cold War social science methods that informed both counter-insurgency network surveillance and precision/data journalism. With the failure of utopian notions of data production the paranoid anti-communism behind the computational view of the social has returned. Techno-metaphors of the social have proliferated in order to reinscribe the expertise and truth claims of a technocratic habitus. In reclaiming the centre explosive political forces and radical critiques of power have become data points that signal a social pathogen. The cultural capital of academia, think tanks and journalism have been deployed in constructing a subversion monitoring infrastructure which designates “fake news” and Russian bots while algorithmically suppressing and de-platforming alternative media both right and left. The cost of “saving” truth and the field of journalism is the subsumption of its autonomy to the field of power as the national security state and giant tech corporations function as the guarantors of truth. This new infrastructure of truth is a precise demonstration that claims to universal, autonomous and transcendent ideals are in the final instance products of the field of power.

The Field, Truth and Heteronomy The utility of Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory (1993, 1995, 1998) for understanding the current political crises rests in the view of social discourse and politics as produced by dynamic struggles between cultural fields. The formation of fields, such as journalism, represent the way historically contingent practices become ritualized and accumulate forms of social power or capital. It is a sociological theory that acknowledges both structure and variegated agency while not eschewing the chaotic forces of the social that may erupt to destabilize the relations between and within fields. It is my

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intention in this chapter to layout the contradictions of the field of journalism, born of its claims to universal truth, that have made it a space for the return of the political of which the fake news phenomenon is one symptom. The political here is understood in discourse theory (Mouffe 2005; Laclau 2005) terms as the affective and libidinal logics of antagonism which defy the normative, rational and strategic range of actions presupposed within a field. The politics of Donald Trump which have licensed a populist jouissance and epistemology is at once an attack on the cultural capital of professional fields and a perfection of a heteronomous media logic. Journalism embodies the tensions within cultural fields as a symbolically powerful guardian of democratic cultural practices while being internally driven by contradictory economic, political and cultural incentives. The formation of a field represents a configuration of power and politics that allows for abstract cultural values to presuppose a distance from power as universal ideals. In the case of journalism the claim to ‘produce knowledge of universal validity’ (Hallin 2006, p. 1), or “Truth”, is a claim to a professional, abstracted form of cultural labour that is the exclusive preserve of the field. This notion of the field has to be articulated against what Bourdieu terms the ‘field of power’ (1995, p. 215). The state, economy and class relations are the ambient hegemonic space against which a cultural field articulates autonomy. The journalistic cri de cœur to “speak truth to power” represents the field at its most idealistic in imagining itself at a distance to the field of power. This notion of autonomy, however tenuous, thus ‘provides the pre-conditions for the full creative process proper to each field and ultimately resistance to the “symbolic violence” exerted by the dominant system of hierarchization’ (Benson 1999, p. 465). The journalistic field in occupying a position within the field of power is torn between its cultural values and the disciplining power of external laws. The field can be thought of as a ‘microcosm within the macrocosm’ (Benson 2006, p. 188) of the field of power. The means by which the field of journalism structures agency, or the strategic ‘positiontakings’ (Bourdieu 2005, p. 30) of agents, is through contradictory poles of valorization and social capital. Journalists, media figures and members of adjacent fields vie for the cultural capital of journalism; that is the values which render the field seemingly autonomous, transcendent and universal. Journalism is defined by a high-degree of cultural capital within the broader field as it is a unique mass repository for normative democratic and enlightenment values. Legacy media such as The New York Times or The Washington Post function as standard bearers for the cultural capital of the field due to accumulated prestige and their role in cultural and

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historical memory. Autonomy and cultural capital are reified through the myth-making functions of stories such as Watergate or the Pentagon Papers where journalistic truth-telling is ascribed a transformative power. Individuals call upon this cultural capital in embodying a professional journalistic habitus that establishes truth as much on the basis of performative and formal style as content (Broersma 2010). Habitus is a peculiar disposition as it is at once an alluring cultural force drawing idealists into the field, while simultaneously routinizing the labour of journalism and the empiricist mechanized production of “Truth”. It is in this way that journalism produces hegemony or ‘Doxa’, i.e. ‘the universe of the tacit presuppositions that we accept as the natives of a certain society’ (Bourdieu 2005, p. 37). Thus even in this realm of pure cultural capital the field is caught in the dialectic of idealism and reproducing the field of power. In an era of neoliberal post-politics there is a pervasive ‘cynical idealism’ (Jutel 2020) in the profession or what Bourdieu would describe as Illusio; an ‘emotional and cognitive “investment” in the stakes in any particular field, or simply the belief that the game is worth playing’ (Benson and Neveu 2005, p. 3). The contradictions of the journalistic field extend from its ubiquity in the field of power, often as a constitutionally enshrined social good, and its position as a ‘very weakly autonomous field’ (Benson 2006, p. 195). Through the field of journalism lies prestige and a short-cut to success for ‘media entrepreneurs’ (Jutel 2013) in adjacent fields of politics, academia and business. The cultural capital to produce “Truth” as Doxa is vital to ‘those whose profession is the making explicit of categories of construction of reality’ (Bourdieu 2005, p. 38). Bourdieu’s béte noire of this sort of entrepreneurialism was Benard Henri Levy (1998, p. 54) who as a journo-philosopher, is a thoroughly mediatized actor, operating between and bypassing the strictures of specific fields. Journalism’s cultural capital and media access function as a ‘media meta-capital’ (Couldry 2003) recalibrating the poles of all fields towards a heteronomous media capital. The role of forums like TED-Talks serve to articulate a cultural capital for a broad technocratic class1 of “Thought Leaders” or highly mediatized actors in the fields of academia, politics, tech and science. What binds this technocratic class disposition is the performative partaking in a post-political production of universal truth. Journalistic Truth, rational discourse and

1 I term this a class rather than a field because it centres around the heteronomous high culture poles of fields without it announcing or regulating itself as a field.

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civility are the rules of the game that serve to guarantee a neoliberal consensus around a dominant ‘principles of vision and division…[and] legitimate categories of construction of the social world’ (Bourdieu 2005, p. 37). Putting aside the inter and intra field competition for journalism’s cultural capital, the principle force that contradicts a field’s idealism is its pole of economic capital. This pole does not simply make actors in a field subservient to the logic of commodity production but allows journalists and media figures to invoke audience share, ratings and online impact where the prestige of Peabody’s and Pulitzer’s is scarce. The far-right Fox News has long wielded its status as the top-rated cable news network as a populist validation of its status within the field (Jutel 2013). The hypercommercialization of the journalistic field, brought about by the demise of state broadcasters, deregulation, global media monopolies and the rise of online media giants, has been ideologically central to a broader shift in the field of power. The heteronomy of the field and importance of a media meta-capital has produced a ‘convergence among all the fields and pulling them closer to the commercial pole in the larger field of power’ (Benson 1999, p. 471). Where Bourdieu saw television journalism and an ‘audience ratings mentality’ (2005, p. 43) as driving commercialization more broadly, the hegemony of online media values intensifies and universalizes a neoliberal logic of self-commodification. A reorganization of the field has occurred dictated by online media economies, as in the so-called ‘pivot to video’ (Kosoff 2018) where traditional media have downsized and thrown themselves before the logic of data production and Facebook advertising. Journalists and “content-producers” are dependent upon a mixed cultural and economic capital of virality, online impact and an authentic connection with empowered media prosumers. The heteronomous logic of neoliberal mediatization means journalists, academics, politicians and media consumers alike are interpellated as subjects who accrue media capital as part of individual brand strategies. In this way the heteronomous pole is not articulated in brutal economistic terms but as a data populism whereby those that succeed embody a techno-democratic cultural capital. Donald Trump is the embodiment of this heteronomy as a media entrepreneur par excellence who has leveraged his celebrity, class power and media capital to make an end run on the fields of politics and business. Prior to his presidency he sat astride fields as a ubiquitous brand, reality television “star” and a conservative political sideshow. His media capital extends from the prestige of network television (The Apprentice), the activated conservative base of Fox News viewers, alternative far-right

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media such as Info Wars and his own Twitter presence that allowed him and his fan base to buck Republican party attempts to coral a far-right jouissance (Jutel 2017a). Trump captures this heteronomous media capital by presenting himself as a pure subject of mediatization. As Hearn writes ‘he demonstrates and embodies what many people are now doing daily’ (2016, p. 658), that is, the mediatized injunction to build one’s brand by throwing oneself into circulation, ceaselessly posting in search of opportunity. Trump’s instincts for self-promotion, a schoolyard machismo and ruthless opportunism allowed him to ride and shape online streams of popular outrage to his own ends. He has coalesced a following, more akin to a celebrity fanbase, that is invested in #MAGA through their own acts of alienated neoliberal self-narrativizing and social media posts, and experience Trump’s petty grievances as an authentic extension of the people’s fight. Nothing symbolizes the mediatized collapse of fields quite like Trump’s disinterest in the presidency apart from the attendant media capital he would accrue.2 Trump’s amalgamation of the tv-ratings mentality, a capricious reality-tv logic of “winning” and demagogic virality gives lie to the techno-optimism that the heteronomous logic of online media embodied anything other than the subsumption of professional fields to a populist commercialism.

The Field, Trump and the Political It is hard to overstate the destabilizing role of Trump upon the field of journalism and American political culture. Trump’s embodiment of the heteronomous pole across fields, in addition to his presidential power, accords him a unique mass and scale of action for reorienting fields. As Bourdieu explains in Einsteinian terms ‘the more energy a body has, the more it distorts the space around it, and a very powerful agent within a field can distort the whole space, cause the whole space to be organized in relation to itself’ (2005, p. 43). Trump’s media capital, which he prizes above all 2 Michael Wolf’s all-access account “Fire and Fury” claims Trump had no interest in winning the presidency but was driven by a mediatized rationale that ‘losing was winning’ (Wolf 2018, p. 34). Trump would increase his fame as a ‘martyr to crooked Hillary’, while Ivanka and Jared would emerge as ‘international celebrities and [Trump] brand ambassadors’ (ibid., p. 34). Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen testified to the US House Oversight Committee that Trump saw his campaign as ‘the greatest infomercial in political history’ (2019). Cohen confirmed Wolf’s account that Trump ‘never expected to win the primary. He never expected to win the general. The campaign for him was always a marketing opportunity’ (ibid.).

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else, is dependent upon an ability to monopolize media attention whether through unpredictability, raging narcissism, novel vulgarity, demagoguery and contempt for the rules of the game. Trump’s declaration that ‘the Fake News media [is] the true Enemy of the People [sic]’ (2018) and combative press conferences have been a ratings boon (Adgate 2018), while producing a surrealist news cycle that revolves around him and his moods. It was this fascination with the grotesque that saw the media afford him nearly $4.96 billion in free media in the 2016 election, compared to Clinton’s $3.24 billion, while television ratings soared (Francia 2018, p. 447). As famously uttered by CBS chairman Les Moonves the Trump ‘circus…may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS’ (Collins 2016). His presence as a media, cultural and political force across fields has elicited a defence of civility from the technocratic class that prize the field of journalism as the space of Truth and Doxa. This reactive position to Trump and the threat to normative values solidifies the perverse economic incentives of the Trump subsumed field. Establishment media companies have reiterated a perceived exclusive access to the imperilled and scarce cultural resource of “Truth”. “Now more than ever” has become a consistent refrain of the resistance to Trump (Caton 2017) whereby cultural consumption, including liberal journalism, is imbued with political meaning as a commitment to truth and civility. This injunction to “support journalism now more than ever”3 speaks to the insularity of the field that is now threatened by this crisis of legitimacy. We simply do not have the time to ask how the unthinkable came to pass but must support the standard bearers of journalism, whatever their failings. The New York Times deployed this urgent message with its first television ad in seven years during the 2017 Oscars. The ad compiles Trump era news soundbites and quotes to reinforce a sense of political and cultural confusion before the appearance of its masthead and the tagline ‘The truth is more important now than ever’ (The New York Time 2017). What these performative acts reaffirming truth and the field do not confront is that the efficacy of universal truth claims rest upon the political. The liberal technocratic principle of vision and division around truth and nontruth has been supplanted by the political (Mouffe 2005). The political, as

3 Caton (2017) cites this refrain and similar funding pleas in the months after the election in the ad and editorial copy of the Guardian U.S., Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle and Slate.

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distinct from the field of politics,4 is the animating force of antagonistic division in the social space, in populist terms between a people and an enemy, that is the precondition for politics (Laclau 2005). Trump’s media capital is not simply a question of ratings and twitter followers but the libidinal coalescence of followers in his antagonistic/political disruption of fields. The measure of truth in the Trump universe is this combination of economic capital and social symbolic power (the political) that functions as a libidinal shortcut to meaning. Trump’s propensity for conspiracy, born of both opportunism and narcissism, is largely immune to journalistic debunking so long as he is faithful to the political and libidinal investment of his populist followers. The evidentiary short-circuit between the libidinal and universal truth claims has been a consistent feature of right-wing populist media figures like Glenn Beck and Alex Jones who expound John Birch society conspiracies as the rational pursuit of critical knowledge (Jutel 2018). In approaching this question of populist truth from a field and discourse theory perspective it is evident that truth only has symbolic power as part of an antagonistic political articulation.5 At an ontological level the current configuration of the field of journalism is not equipped to deal with the political and Trump’s populist epistemology. The cultural capital of the field rests on the idea that facts exist that are acceptable to all and as such form the basis of a unified public (Muhlman 2008). Muhlman describes the rituals of truth-seeking and journalistic objectivity as lacking a ‘clear epistemological coherence’ (ibid., p. 10). Where right-wing populism embraces antagonism and enjoyment as the ends of politics, a liberal political culture displaces and disavows the traumatic forces of the political through the drive for facts. The failure of a unified public to emerge is seen as a technocratic challenge of information, communication blockages and insufficient facts. The commitment to an apolitical factual centre represents a self-fecund drive and habitus which imparts the affective pleasure of belonging to this technocratic class. However the apolitical recourse to ‘a scientific habitus privileging factual

4 Bourdieu’s view of politics as the power to impose symbolic violence and the ‘legitimate principle of vision and division’ (2005, p. 39) is not dissimilar from the discourse theory premise that antagonism is the ontologically necessary condition of possibility for politics. 5 In a similar vein Thompson writes in the Introduction to Bourdieu’s Language and Symbolic Power ‘ Linguistic utterances or expressions are always produced in particular contexts or markets, and the properties of these markets endow linguistic products with a certain “value”’ (1991, p. 18).

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data against the hackneyed justification of others’ (Phelan and Salter 2019, p. 163) does not match the jouissance of Trumpian outbursts. The Republican strategist Karl Rove is infamous for deriding journalists as members of the ‘reality-based community’ (Suskind 2004) who can only respond to the realities created by the right. And while Rove has since been eclipsed on the right by the surging populism he helped create, he identifies truth as the contingent product of a political delineation. The wholistic populist worldview represents an idée-force that ‘has to be countered by another idée-force, capable of mobilizing a counter force’ (Bourdieu 2005, p. 39). The rise of Trump has elicited a collective response from professionals across fields invested in the capital of journalistic truth as a guarantor of civic values, rationalism and meritocracy. This response views Trump as an exceptional moment rather than the culmination of American conservative politics within a heteronomous media logic. Around the identity of “The Resistance” the media and political class have sought to stage the ‘recovery of the “centre” from its usurper’ (Muhlmann, p. 105). In approaching the political the field of journalism draws on historical memory in reanimating the rhetoric and habitus of Edward R. Murrow in staging a conflict between the virtuous patriotic centre and an external enemy. Exigent times have necessitated a break from dispassionate truth-telling and the re-articulation of values in the appeal to “us” as a unified public. The countless grandiloquent monologues channelling Murrow, from MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, CNN’s Jake Tapper to late night comedians, produce a cultural product and habitus that sustain fantasies of the centre and the symbolic power of facts and rhetorical evisceration. Murrow’s politics of the patriotic centre is premised upon ‘a perpetual alertness on “our” part against our own tendency to forget ourselves’ (Muhlmann, p. 107). Appeals to shared values, or the common refrain among journalists that “This is not normal”, delegitimize Trump, not as a political enemy proper, but on the basis of civic norms. Each urgent moralistic response to Trump’s transgression recapitulates “our” values as a form of resistance that displaces the political into media consumption. This has reified the apolitical cultural capital of the field while proving lucrative for media entrepreneurs who trade in both patriotic pabulum and a unique insight into Trumpian subversion. This is a category of the field which includes both a small group of anti-Trump Republicans, aggrieved specifically on issues of decorum, and self-proclaimed Twitter sleuths who claim to be inching closer to a breakthrough of evincing truth (Higgins 2018). A centre is reconstituted around the pairing of concerns for civility and

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subversion. The threat of Trump is not constitutive of the political as such but is the product of subversion in the form of fake news, hacking and collusion with an external enemy. The reheating of Cold War6 discourse around Russia is necessary in order to construct a centre in patriotic terms and attribute contingent, overdetermined political forces to the outside.7 The journalistic drive for truth to understand this nefarious plot is premised upon the belief in a Watergate “truth will out” moment whereby journalists and noble civil servants, such as Robert Mueller, will discipline or unseat Trump.8 The Trump subsumed newscycle consolidates a Resistance habitus that enjoys its outrage and an affective residue of journalistic cultural capital predicated upon a field whose autonomy no longer exists. The impassioned attempts of the field to recast a patriotic “us” against a subversive outside has necessitated the reiteration of civil discourse as the rules of the game and an end in itself. Staging a resistance and embodying the habitus of patriotic truth-seeking represents the ‘pleasure of playing the game, of participating in the fiction, of being in total accord with the premises of the game’ (Bourdieu 1995, pp. 333–334); namely that civil discourse around established truths transcends the political. Civility within the field in the era of Trump is a fetishistic drive9 and performance of identity which protects the field from assuming the ‘full ontological weight’

6 Murrow himself, the subject of Red Scare smears, famously battled Joseph McCarthy on appeals to his own exemplary patriotism: ‘The record would soon show who had served the Communists – You or I’ (Muhlmann, p. 103). 7 The grand narrative of Trump/Russia collusion, which has been effectively shot down by the publication of the Mueller report, has been a spectacular collective failure of the field with leaders such as The Guardian, CNN, MSNBC and Slate having committed egregious acts of misreporting (Greenwald 2019). For an exploration of Russiagate narratives see Jutel (2017b, 2020). 8 The feverish state of the perpetual Resistance news cycle was satirized by the online video company Super Deluxe (2018). The video titled “Donald Trump Is Finished” is a supercut that tracks the use of Trump era media clichés; “Bombshell”, “Turning Point”, “Beginning of the End”, “Tipping Point”, throughout his presidency. 9 One of the more remarkable examples of the Times’ civility fetish was the coverage of Allan Dershowitz’s personal travails in the exclusive Martha’s Vineyard vacation island. Dershowitz wrote a self-serving column for The Hill in which he describes his liberal neighbours cold shoulder, resulting from his critiques of the Mueller investigation, as a regrettable ‘symptom of the times’ (2018). The Times astonishingly gave this “story” the front page and ran four stories, across four different news desks involving eight different journalists in the course of six days (Grove 2018).

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(Žižek 1997, p. 60) of its position. The figure that has emerged in journalism discourse as the repository of redemptive civic virtue is the so-called “Never Trump” Republican as personified by the late John McCain.10 The recalibration of the New York Times editorial page for the Trump age has been geared towards solidifying the Never-Trump habitus. The Times has added Bari Weiss and Brett Stephens to its existing stable of Never Trumpers (David Brooks, Ross Douthat) while excluding Trumpian populists and Bernie Sanders-style social democrats. Outside of its editorial decisions the Times’ political beat reporting has been similarly myopic. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s congressional primary campaign in the Bronx received no coverage from the Times prior to her victory (Levine 2018a). The overarching concern for civility serves to disavow the political in all its forms, left or right, while rearticulating a field and discourse that bears little relation to the broader social field.11 The Never-Trump habitus, necessary to pose a depoliticized civil high-ground, is a political articulation that can only claim the media field as a constituency. Despite Trump’s tumultuous first two years and a unified journalistic resistance, his approval ratings among his own party are consistently and historically high, second only to George W. Bush after 9/11 (Guilford 2018). The field’s fetishistic investment in a redemptive patriotic “us” reached its apogee with the Times taking the extraordinary step of publishing an anonymous op-ed entitled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration” (2018). Citing McCain as a ‘lodestar’ an unnamed senior official is at pains to assuage readers that ‘there are adults in the room’ working to thwart Trump’s worst impulses (ibid.). The editorial self-servingly posits a depoliticized patriotic centre and resistance on the basis of civility, competency and a hawkish foreign policy. The author is proud of signature Trump era achievements

10 McCain was a consistent target of brutal personal attacks from Trump and was subsequently held up by journalists, in the words of the Columbia Journalism Review, ‘as the standard bearer for all that is decent and noble in American politics’ (Vernon 2018). This vaunted status speaks to McCain’s commitment to the rules of the game and the cultivation of a certain media capital, through his often public and dramatic deliberations as a crucial Senate vote, rather than a substantive political antagonism. McCain’s voting record in the Senate was 83% in alignment with the Trump White House which was among the highest for Republicans Senators who represent a district in which Trump won by less than 5% (FiveThirtyEight 2019). 11 As a politics sans antagonism it is susceptible to co-optation as with Trump’s “Jobs not Mobs” mid-term election campaign slogan which cast the populists as victims of incivility.

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such as environmental deregulation, increased military spending and massive tax cuts, but is driven to sabotage Trump on the basis of his ill-suited temperament. The inadequacies of the field in describing the political in this radical conjuncture accounts for this superficial notion of resistance and the recasting of the crisis as solely a question of civility and subversion.

Fake News and Technocratic Class Consciousness Defining the crisis of Trump as one of Fake News and the rise of “Posttruth politics” has become a means of reimposing the cultural capital of journalism and disavowing the indeterminacy of the social field as the corruption of communication networks via hacking, bots and data theft. The swing from the data-informed certainty of a Clinton victory, to the preoccupation with subversive memes retains the field’s ideological investment in data; simply inverting a techno-utopianism for a view of the political as pathology. The saliency of techno-metaphors of the social12 owes to a broader technocratic class consciousness invested in the meta-capital of journalistic truth and a hegemonic vision of web 2.0 as a space of democratic deliberation and collaboration. I speak of a class disposition because of the demonstrable ideological, material and political shifts in the field of power which account for this habitus across fields. The centrality of data journalism to a meta-capital of truth which offers a near computational view of the social is inextricably linked to the empiricism and positivism of the cognitivist revolution which dominated social science funding priorities during the massive cold war expansion of the academy (Knight 2016). This was accompanied by a political realignment of American liberalism with the professional, i.e. high cultural capital subject of a respective field, elevated as the privileged subject of politics.13 Chris Anderson’s Apostle’s of Certainty (2018) traces the important history and institutional emergence of data journalism as a response to the

12 2020 Democratic party presidential hopeful Kamala Harris in her campaign launch stated of Trump and Russia; ‘we have foreign powers infecting the White House like malware’ (2019). 13 The journalist and historian Thomas Frank identifies the Democratic party presidential candidacy of George McGovern in 1972 as a decisive split from organized labour towards the post-industrial professionals that influential party strategist Frederick Dutton described reverentially as ‘aristocrats en masse’ (Frank 2016, p. 41).

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social tumult of the late 60s where the ‘New Journalism’ movement and New Left radicals threatened a dispassionate journalistic habitus. Precision Journalism, described as ‘social science in a hurry’ (ibid., p. 3) by lead practitioner Philip Meyer, represented a ‘doubling down on journalistic objectivity and journalistic certitude’ (p. 85). Meyer’s famous Pulitzer Prize winning work on the 1967 Detroit riots was exemplary of survey driven, computer-assisted methods for understanding social unrest. In interviews with Andersen, Meyer describes his impetus to establish the field of Precision Journalism through Harvard’s Nieman Foundation as a desire to understand the ascendant political and social science methods of Ithiel de Sola Pool (ibid., p. 93). De Sola Pool personified the Cold War imperatives of state-funded social science and the transcendent idealism of the technocracy. The father of computer modelled political campaigning he held a ‘utopian belief in the power of cybernetic systems to…run societies in a harmonious manner, managing strife and conflict out of existence’ (Levine 2018b, p. 80). De Sola Pool’s work was essential to the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and his book Technologies of Freedom was a seminal ideological text in constructing the libertarian ethos of the internet. His work at ARPA included domestic counter-insurgency and surveillance as in the Camelot Project which bore the full title ‘Methods for Predicting and Influencing Social Change and Internal War Potential’ (ibid., p. 87). Levine describes the project as ‘a radar system for left-wing revolutions—a computerized early warning system that could predict and prevent political movements before they ever got off the ground’ (ibid., p. 80). Journalism’s recourse to a social science and technocratic habitus is indelibly marked by this view of the political in which outbursts of populism and radical social movements are signs of a social pathology. Data journalism takes up Walter Lippmann’s problematic of the bewildered herd, now with the aid of computation. In inculcating this habitus Journalism functioned as a critical intermediary within the field of power ‘standing between social science, government, and the public’ (Anderson 2018, p. 86) in performing a social science epistemology that cemented the cultural capital of the professional class. However as a discipline at the margins of social science there is an inextricable contradiction ‘between methodological certitude and a barely acknowledged intellectual inferiority’ (ibid., p. 87). Whatever the pretences to universal truth journalism is an impoverished social science. However as a consequence of its meta-capital across the professional fields and this

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sense of inferiority, the field of journalism has positioned itself at the vanguard of paradigmatic change in the social sciences. Bourdieu describes this as the sociology that ‘love this business…to announce the appearance of incredible phenomena or revolutions’ (1998, p. 43). It is in this way that we can understand the field’s exaltation of the digital revolution and the internet as the crowning achievement of the professional class’ transcendent genius.14 Big Data and Silicon Valley techno-solutionism (Morozov 2014) have been embraced by the field in the form of data journalism which promises powerful new ways to interpret the social world through data, with the journalist functioning as a programmer and entrepreneur. This vision was neatly evinced in a report published by the Columbia Journalism School’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism entitled ‘PostIndustrial Journalism’ (Anderson et al. 2012). The authors envision journalists and editors as curators of data feeds, writing code for algorithmic journalism and using powerful machines15 that harness ‘the explosion of data and analytic methods open[ing] whole new vistas of analysis’ (ibid., p. 87). The defining successes of the field will be those that embody the drift between journalism and the start-up world. The asymmetry of Columbia University’s one-year masters of science in data journalism degree costing $100,000 for a career with an average income of $40,000 (Roll 2017) is elided by the mantra’s of tech entrepreneurialism. The cited exemplars of post-industrial journalism are Nate Silver, the economic consultant, politics blogger and statistician, whose website was picked up by the New York Times; and Ezra Klein the wunderkind blogger who was catapulted to the editorship of Vox (Anderson et al.). Klein and Silver are the mavens of the data-driven entrepreneurial journalism that promises tech-enabled certainty. Vox presents itself as ‘explanatory journalism’ and ‘the single greatest resource available for people to understand the news’ (2014), while Silver bore an air of invincibility until the prediction-defying success of Donald 14 Writing for Harpers Thomas Frank (2018) has decried journalism’s inferiority complex to the cult of the professional; ‘This is a field…that has to a pathological degree embraced the forces that are killing it. No institution has a greater appetite for trendy Internet thinkers than journalism schools. We are all desperately convincing ourselves that we need to become entrepreneurs, or to get ourselves attuned to the digital future – the future that is described to us by a cast of transparent bullshit artists’ (p. 145). 15 One of the promises of the digital revolution was the democratization of powerful data tools such as Google’s Fusion Tables. The announcement of Google’s shutdown of Fusion Tables (Melendez 2018) is a blow to data journalism and much like Facebook’s “pivot-tovideo” demonstrates the pitfalls of the field’s faith in monopolistic tech platforms.

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Trump. This is the same technocratic class habitus that epitomized Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016, self-described “algorithmic campaign” steered by data gurus Elan Kreigel and Robbie Mook (Jutel 2020). The exaltation of data journalism as the apogee of social scientific truth is the high cultural capital articulation of the field within the heteronomous logic of data production. The heteronomous function of media within the broader field of power is ubiquitous prosumption through the injunction to like, share and rate your tastes and experiences as forms of immaterial labour and data production. The post-politics of big data, embodied in the techno-utopian pronouncements of Clay Shirky or Yochai Benkler, posit the social as data with the internet serving as a tool that expands in incalculable ways our ability to pursue rational self-interest and a natural desire towards civic-minded cooperation and democracy. The failure of the Clinton campaign to articulate a political idee force in the face of Trump’s populism is a product of the perceived self-evident power of data-derived truth and facts over mass appeals to irrational desires. What the success of Trump reveals, as a thoroughly mediatized political movement, are the libidinal economies of data production that are belied by techno-utopian fantasies. The affective investment in the Trump brand created the coalescence of immaterial labour that allowed him to overcome substantial organizational and financial deficits to Clinton while creating an alt-right media ecosystem of substantial economic value to data companies, Balkan teens and media entrepreneurs alike. The truth of libidinal economies in data production is evidenced by Facebook’s preferential advertising rates to Donald Trump as his incendiary messaging created more value for the company than Clinton’s sterile technocratic messaging (Martinez 2018). In this sense ‘affective feedback loops’, defined by intensity of engagement, are the mechanism by which an illusory precision is projected and replicated through the economic logic of returning affect back to the user in the form desired content, brands and products (Boler and Davis 2018, p. 76). Ascribing the populist jouissance that erupts from this self-replicating drive for data as attributable to fake news and a manipulation of communicative networks is a form fetishist disavowal in the service of the cultural capital of the technocratic class. As Hirst notes ‘the algorithmic amplification of fake news, which enriches Google and Facebook more than it does young bored Macedonian entrepreneurs, is made possible by the deeply embedded structures of surveillance and big data within the digital economy’ (Hirst 2017, p. 87). This infrastructure for affective intensification

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interpellates the subject of data production as a critical truth-seeker creating network connections to challenge gatekeepers and myopic cultural institutions, including the fields of politics and journalism. Kellyanne Conway’s much derided notion of “alternative facts” speaks to the substantive creation of an antagonistic populist epistemology or forms ‘counterknowledge’ (Ylä-Anttila 2018, p. 359) from within the network.16 The alt-right and the so-called intellectual dark web ‘claim to hold knowledge, truth and evidence in high esteem…and engage in popularization of scientific knowledge and rhetoric’ (ibid., p. 358) often in the forms of race science, social Darwinism and other “truths” that a “post-modern”, “politically correct” elite are deemed too scared to confront. The computational belief that social networks will allow technocrats to divine the social is functionally indistinguishable from the populist drive to amass counterknowledge and a conspiratorial jouissance. Within the heteronomous logic of data production “truth” and “fake news” function as floating signifiers wielded by all sides and only made meaningful through an antagonistic political articulation. In order to disavow this crisis of truth and data production the cultural capital of the professional class has been deployed to restore the Cold War computational view of the social that lies in the origins of network surveillance. To borrow Anderson’s language the habitus of data journalism has been used to “double-down” on technocratic certainty over the social and the existence of a patriotic “us”. An infrastructure of think tanks, academic research centres, cyber-consultancy firms, National Security policy entrepreneurs and tech companies have committed themselves to salvaging truth. Most recently DARPA has announced a ‘Semantic Forensics’ program which will seek to algorithmically ‘identify, deter, and understand adversary disinformation campaigns’ (2019). The new sociology of truth combines Kremlinology and social network analysis in attributing social unrest and antagonism to a sophisticated asymmetric disinformation offensive waged by Russia and the Internet Research Agency (IRA), described

16 One of the rallying cries for the far-right pro-Trump conspiracy movement QAnon is the former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s address to the conservative Young Americans Foundation. Flynn attributes the success of the Trump campaign to ‘an army of digital soldiers…what we call citizens journalists…who took over the idea of information. They did it through social media’ (YAFTV 2016). What is remarkable here is just how thoroughly the American far-right has taken on the techno-optimist discourses of alternative and social media empowerment.

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as a ‘flesh-eating virus’ (Lapowsky 2018) upon American democracy.17 For all the claims to sophisticated analysis this new sociology of digital truth is a facsimile of Cold War hypodermic needle models of communication and propaganda, assuming a straight line from Russian memes to a Trump presidency. This collective effort guided by the interests of the national security state has resulted in algorithmic tweaks which de-emphasize alternative media both right and left (Taibbi 2018); the de-platforming of Alex Jones but also radical citizen journalism pages like Cop Block (Blumenthal 2018); and the installation of NATO think tank the Atlantic Council as the principle fake news editors at Facebook. In the journalistic fervour of Russiagate, opaque groups such as Hamilton ’68 (Frenkel and Wakabayashi 2018) and PropOrNot have been given definitional authority to declare Russian bot activity or denounce critical voices as Russian ‘useful idiots’ (Timberg 2016). The cyber-warfare expert is the ascendant arbiter of truth, claiming a technocratic vantage over subversion and disinformation from the patriotic centre aided by advanced analytic tools and knowledge. This reconstitution of truth and the cultural capital of the field represents the subsumption of journalistic autonomy to the broader field of power as its animating drive becomes indistinguishable from Cold War paranoia of the social. The apotheosis of a circular data-fetishism is demonstrated in the case of cyber-security consultancy firm New Knowledge (NK). The firm was founded by Johnathan Martin, a developer of the Hamilton ’68 bot dashboard, who worked for the Brookings Institute, Obama’s state department on counter-terrorism and DARPA. The methodology of Martin’s work at both Hamilton ’68 and NK is shrouded by proprietary knowledge however he has offered a working definition of fake news as that which ‘makes you feel too angry or really provokes that type of almost tribal response’ (Cohen 2018). This view of political antagonism as pathology and subversion was given a broad audience with NK commissioned by the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to deliver the defining report on the

17 Adrian Chen of the New Yorker who originally uncovered the Internet Research Agency troll farm has opined that the IRA’s campaign was ‘inept and haphazard’ and has been ‘blown out of proportion’ by so-called ‘information warfare’ experts (Chen 2018). He jibes that ‘only an expert, well-versed in terms such as “exposure,” “feedback loops,” and “active measures,” can peer into the black box and explain to the layperson how it works’ (ibid.).

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Russian meme campaign waged by the IRA.18 In the report NK claimed that Russia’s decisive tactic was ‘developing Black audiences and recruiting Black Americans as assets’ (2018). In an echo of civil rights era language of “outside agitators”, African-American alienation from the political process does not stem from systemic oppression, the stripping of the Voting Rights Act or the aggressive Republican attempts at voter disenfranchisement but crude Russian memes. This positing of a patriotic “us” has always relied on African-Americans as the ur-pathological subject of politics to be inoculated and contained from the Communist menace. NK’s claim to algorithmically master and divine social forces in defence of democracy and a patriotic “us” can only reproduce the paranoid delusions of the field of power. The self-reproduction of truth, expertise and mastery in the face of the technocratic crisis of legitimacy was precisely demonstrated by NK’s controversial research project during the fiercely contested 2017 Alabama special election for senate between Democrat Doug Jones and Republican Roy Moore. In a race that seemed to typify the excesses of Trumpian populism, with a far-right candidate accused of repeat sexual misconduct, NK sought to test its understanding of nefarious Russian tactics. A leaked internal report states that ‘We [NK] orchestrated an elaborate “false flag” operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet’ (Shane and Blinder 2018). With a budget of $100,000 NK created fake social media pages for a third-party candidate, more than one thousand Cyrillic language “Russian” accounts followed Roy Moore and Hamilton ’68 provided the verification for this disinformation campaign which was then picked up by national media (Cohen 2018). From this position within the field of power NK is able to treat the polity and social field as simply testing sites for their mastery while reproducing their own nightmares as a form of technocratic truth. While this elaborate infrastructure of truth, is demonstrably farcical, delusional and corrupt, it is invested by journalists as exemplary of the new sociology of truth. The cost of reconstituting truth is forgoing autonomy, subsumption to the field power and a liberal disavowal of the political that

18 The $46,000 IRA campaign amounted to just 0.05% of political Facebook ad spends

during the 2016 elections and posts generated by suspected Russian accounts amounted to 1 out 23,000 pieces of content on Facebook’s news feed (Mate 2018). Mate has described the IRA as a conventional clickbait marketing operation which glommed onto the US presidential campaign, among many other topics, because this was a driver of impassioned online prosumption.

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can do nothing more than reflect back the paranoid fantasies of the field of power.

Conclusion The desire to cast the radical conjuncture of Trump to the nebulous forces of fake news and post-truth politics is an attempt to preserve the cultural capital of professional fields imperiled by Trump’s appeals to populist jouissance. The centrality of the field of journalism to both the rise of Trump and the re-articulation of truth speaks to a meta-capital desired across fields as the site of vision and division. Journalistic truth functions to consolidate a technocratic class habitus and the rules of the game upon which professional fields compete and reproduce themselves. The pretense to universal truth as an abstracted form of labour exclusive to the journalistic field helps create both a technocratic political consensus and sustains an ideal of the field as sequestered from the vagaries of the field of power. However this cultural capital, in functioning as a meta-capital desired across fields, accounts for both the ubiquity of journalism and its heteronomy. Journalism and its media-capital draw other fields towards the economic logic of data production, online virality and media performativity. It is in this way that Trump simultaneously threatens professional fields while perfecting a heteronomous media logic that allows him to escapes the disciplinary mechanisms of the journalistic and political fields. Trump embodies the populist commercialism identified in Bourdieu’s critique of television, augmented with a capricious reality tv logic of pure self-interest, which secures for him an authentic connection to a populist public invested in his jouissance. In a profound demonstration of the failures of the technocratic class and the conflation of data production with truth, Trump was vaulted to the presidency, despite his indifference towards the office, through the pursuit of a heteronomous media capital that he sought for its own end. As a pure subject of this heteronomous media capital Trump structures the field around him, as an irresistible media spectacle that allows the field to cast the political as a grandiose struggle for truth between populists and professionals. High cultural capital media consumption, from The New York Times, The Washington Post or Rachel Maddow, gains an epoch-defining urgency as a form of participation in a broad liberal truth-seeking habitus. What this defence of the field and truth elides is an antagonistic political articulation or idee force that could displace the efficacy of Trump’s populist jouissance. In the place of antagonism truth-seeking becomes a

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drive that delays the confrontation with the traumatic realities of Trump’s populism and the failures of the field. In full fetishistic disavowal the field conjures up its past glories in order to restage the battle for a patriotic unified public threatened by outside subversives. Russiagate offers the liberal truth-seeker an embattled identity as “The Resistance”, soaring Murrow-esque rhetorical flourishes and the promise of uncovering the plot that has splintered a patriotic “us”. The ultimate objective in this struggle is re-instituting the field’s rules of the game, namely civility and respect for consensus-forming truths absent the ontological necessity of political antagonism. The figures that embody this resistance are national security bureaucrats, “Never-Trump” Republicans and in one remarkable instance a Trump administration official who supports his policy goals but abhors his tone. This elaborate pseudo-politics exists to disavow the political, malign the left critique of liberalism and salvage the cultural capital of the field through the ritualistic consumption and participation in truth-seeking. Where the truth-seeking habitus expands beyond a tired historical repertoire and a civility fetishism is in the amalgamation of data journalism with the “new sociology” of cyber security. The trauma of Trump and the failure of a heteronomous data production to yield enlightened, meritocratic outcomes has seen a reversion to the National Security imperatives inherent in network surveillance. At its origin data journalism represents a technocratic response to the social tumult of the late 60s and mirrors the social science research imperatives of the Cold War state. This vantage over the social space serves both an autonomous cultural capital of expertise and the notion that the pathological forces of the political might be managed. The contradiction here is that the field’s autonomy, and a great deal of the social science it calls upon as its method, is inseparable from the field of power and by extension a repressed political division of the social space. In experiencing the rise of Trump as a manifestation of cyber warfare the field casts its apolitical cultural capital as salvagable, with the aid of national security contractors and disinformation “experts”. In the name of truth powerful new media corporations, the security state and a cast of cyber-security grifters have been elevated as privileged agents marking the subsumption of the journalistic field and its cultural capital to the field of power. The political pathologies of the state, from a rabid anti-communism to a fear of Black Lives Matter, masquerade as truth in the name of defending democratic institutions from Donald Trump. Acknowledgement For Tony Schirato a friend and great Bourdiuian.

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Index

Note: Entries in italics denote figures. A Aboriginal Australians, 145–147 Access Hollywood tape, 28, 34 aestheticized regime of politics, 80–83, 81n1, 88, 96, 99, 101 affective-textual encounters, 32 Agamben, Giorgio, 83, 145 Ahmed, Sarah, 34 Alderson, Andrew, 6 algorithmic calculations, automated, 89 alienation, 52, 82–83, 91, 99, 101, 183 alternative facts, 193 Althusser, Louis and ideology, 10, 97, 111–113, 113n8, 118–119, 124 on Marx, 91 and psychoanalysis, 108, 116–118 alt-right movements, 11, 79, 121, 192 American Dream, 134 anaesthetics, 101 Andersen, Chris, 189, 193 Andrejevic, Mark, 29, 31 Ang, Ien, 32

Anglophone popular media, 8 Ansell, Amy, 58 anthropogenesis, 83, 99 anthropology, as organising principle, 159 anti-humanism, 3, 117 anti-immigrant sentiments, 131, 133, 146, 148. See also xenophobia anti-racist politics, 141 The Apprentice, 7, 15, 19, 26, 29, 30, 182 Arab Spring, 100 Arendt, Hannah, 144 ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency), 189–190 arts and crafts, 160, 166 asylum seekers, 134, 144–148 atemporality, 51 Australia asylum seekers in, 145–146 political corruption in, 111 racism in, 133

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 R. Overell and B. Nicholls (eds.), Post-Truth and the Mediation of Reality, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25670-8

203

204

INDEX

Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 120–121, 120n12 authenticity and reality television, 25, 28 Trump’s appeal to, 178 Azari, Ehsan, 164

Brooks, David, 188 Brown, Wendy, 141 Buck-Morss, Susan, 81, 99, 101 Burnett, Mark, 15, 26 Bush, George W., 125n13, 188 Butler, Judith, 139, 141

B Badiou, Alan, 101 Baldwin, Alec, 31 banality, spectacle of, 18–19, 22 Baudrillard, Jean, 8–9 conservative characterisations of, 62 and Jordan Peterson, 58, 68–74 on mediation, 87 on reality television, 18–21 and telemorphosis, 17–18, 29, 34 Beck, Glenn, 185 belief and ideology, 124–125 Jordan Peterson on, 66, 68 in love, 46 Beller, Jonathan, 80, 83, 95, 99 Benjamin, Walter, 81–83, 99, 101 Benkler, Yochai, 192 Bennett, Tony, 82 The Best Offer, 9, 39–53 Bhabha, Homi, 147 Big Brother franchise, 18, 20 big data, 191 Black Lives Matter, 131, 146, 197 Blair, Tony, 169 Bolsonaro, Jair, 111 Bolt, Usain, 5–7 border camps, 34 border policing, 146–147 Bourdieu, Pierre, 178–183, 185–187, 191, 196 Bowman, Paul, 108n2 Brexit, 4, 110, 155 British Cultural Studies, 86, 108

C Callinicos, Alex, 136 calm, as master signifier, 60, 63, 67 Camelot Project, 190 capital and computation, 95 economic, 182, 185 historical logic of, 97–98 See also cultural capital; media capital; social capital capitalism communicative, 100–101 late, 21, 54 and race, 132, 140. See also racial capitalism categorisations, 120, 156, 158–160, 167–169 CCCS (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies), 107, 108n3 chaos, Jordan Peterson on, 9, 65–74 Chen, Adrian, 194 Chiesa, Lorenzo, 52 Chrisman, Laura, 140–141 Christchurch terrorist murders of 2019, 62–63, 131 Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong, 100–101 civility, 178, 182, 184, 186–188, 196–197 clapback, 110, 126 class, 3 and hegemony, 114, 117 and postmodernism, 59 climate change, 8, 58, 110 Clinton, Hillary, 3, 183–184, 189, 191–192

INDEX

Clivio, Franco, 168 Cohen, Andy, 31 Cohen, Michael, 183 coherence, in conspiracy theory, 98 Cold War, 179, 187, 189, 193–194, 197 collectors, 44, 156–158, 167, 169 Collins, Patricia Hill, 140 colonialism, settler, 133, 136, 141–142, 144–145 Columbia University, 191 common sense, 2–3, 115, 119, 121, 127, 138, 156 communication interpretive model of, 9 theories of, 80, 85, 87–88, 91–92, 99 computers, as simulating metaphysics, 87, 89, 97 conjunctural approach, 2–4, 8, 11 and crisis of reality, 7–8 and Lacan, 108–109, 112 race in, 133, 136, 147 conjuncture, 2 consent, reproduction of, 114 conspiracy theory, 60, 81, 96–98, 185, 193 Continental theory, 3 The Conversation, 9 Conway, Kellyanne, 193 Cool Runnings , 6 Cornell, Joseph, 168 Corner, John, 28 correlationism, 80, 83–85, 91–94, 99 cosmopolitanism, 139–141 counterknowledge, 192–193 crisis conjunctural analysis of, 2–4 language of, 4–6 cultural capital of journalism, 177–179, 182, 185–187, 189, 192, 197

205

of professional class, 180, 190–191, 192–194, 196 culturalism, 134 cultural studies Althusser’s contribution to, 2–4, 116–118 Gramsci’s contribution to, 114–115 ideology in, 10, 119 inter-disciplinarity of, 107 Marxism in, 2 and reality, 87 curiosity, 39, 46, 157 cybernetics, 89, 98

D d’Ancoma, Matthew, 169 data journalism, 189–193, 197 data populism, 182 data production, 178–179, 182, 192–194, 196–197 debt, economy of, 100 deGrasse Tyson, Neil, 5 Deleuze, Gilles, 101 demotic turn, 18 ‘deplorables’, 3, 111 Derrida, Jacques, 62 Dershowitz, Alan, 187 Descartes, René, 43 desire and fantasy, 39–43, 46, 122 and language, 52 listening for, 54–55 and post-truth, 173 and the subject, 163–164 towards love, 43–44, 48–52 tragic or pure, 53 yielding, 45 de Sola Pool, Ithiel, 190 destiny, 9, 69–73, 75 deterrence machines, 20, 22, 23 Dettmers, Silke, 165

206

INDEX

difference hermeto-logical, 85, 91, 95 reifying, 141 digital flâneur, 101 digital regime of truth, 83, 88 digitization, 86, 94–95, 100 Dion, Mark, 167 disavowal, 109, 113, 123, 125–127, 177, 192, 195–196 Disneyland, 20–22 dogmatism, 57–59, 74, 84 Douthat, Ross, 188 doxa, 157, 181, 184 Dumm, Thomas, 23–24 Dutton, Peter, 133 E Eagleton, Terry, 81 economic inequality, 142 Eddie the Eagle, 6 editing, strategic, 25 Edwards, Justin, 23 Emin, Tracey, 168 emotional realism, 32–33 emotions as opposed to truth, 64 sticking to objects, 34 Engels, Friedrich, 143 entropy, 88 Ernst, Wolfgang, 94n5 ethno-nationalism, 133, 146, 148 everyday life, 9, 32–33, 99 exotica, 157, 160 extimacy, 50, 112 F Facebook, 2 advertising on, 182, 192 and Donald Trump, 29 fake news editors at, 193 and Jordan Peterson, 63

pivot to video, 191 fact-checking journalism, 10, 16, 107–113, 119–121, 123, 126, 170 fakeness, 7 fake news, 1, 8, 79 anti-Trump use of term, 28 and big data, 192–193 coherence and incoherence in, 98 fact-checking as counter to, 110 journalistic panic over, 177–179, 188 and neoliberalism, 100–101 false consciousness, 109 false equivalence, 63, 69 fanaticism, contemporary, 84 Fanon, Frantz, 140, 146 fantasy and Borromean Knot, 121–123 of escaping telemorphosis, 34 of love, 42–44, 48 of mirror-image, 161 of the Olympic Games, 6 traversing, 46 fascism consent to, 114 conservative characterisation of postmodernism as, 62, 66, 69 and post-truth, 81–82, 100 feedback loops, 19, 88, 89, 192 feeling, structures of, 3 feminism, and postmodernism, 60–61, 63–64, 67 feminine failure, 50 field theory, 179–183 fields, mediatized collapse of, 182–183 financial crisis of 2008. See GFC (Great Financial Crisis) financialisation, 3, 99–100, 115 Flat Earth Theory, 97 Flynn, Michael, 193 Folau, Israel, 119

INDEX

Ford Coppola, Frances, 9 foreclosures, 143–144 Foucault, Michel conservative characterisations of, 62–63 on epistemology, 84 on governmentality, 89 on the grotesque, 17, 22–24, 34 on production of truth, 86 on regimes of truth, 63 Fox and Friends , 21 Fox News , 182–183 Frankfurt, Harry, 171–172 Frank, Thomas, 189, 191 Freud, Sigmund, 112, 122, 162 Fusion Tables, 191

G Galloway, Alexander, 87, 89–90, 95, 97 GFC (Great Financial Crisis), 3–5, 58, 82, 115, 138, 148 Gikandi, Simon, 140 Gilroy, Paul, 139–141 Gladstone, Brooke, 16 Gould, Stephen Jay, 168 governance, performance of, 16 Gramsci, Antonio on conjuncture, 107 and cultural studies, 2–4 and Hall, 86, 138 on hegemony, 114–115, 122 Graulund, Rune, 23 Gray, Herman, 32, 33 Grossberg, Lawrence, 4 the grotesque, power and sovereignty as, 17–18, 20, 22–25, 27, 30, 33–35, 184 Guantanamo Bay, 145

207

H Haider, Shuja, 59 Hall, Stuart and Althusser, 116–118 on authoritarian populism, 148 on British and American cultural studies, 109n3 and CCCS, 107 communication theory, 80, 85–87, 99 and conjuncture, 2–4, 7, 11, 82, 113–115, 137 on financial crisis, 137–138 on ideology, 121 on race and class, 138 Hamilton ‘68, 194, 195 Harris, Kamala, 189 Harris, Laurel, 101 Harvey, David, 143–144 hate watching, 21 hegemonic power, 2–3, 4 hegemonic space, 114 hegemony, Gramsci and Hall on, 114–115 herme-tology, 85–86 hierarchy of categorisation, 160 Peterson’s defence of, 65–66 racial, 135 Hirst, Damien, 168 history, changing concepts of, 157 humanism, 63, 99, 117, 139–141 hyperreality, 16, 24, 31, 32, 62, 70

I idée-force, 179, 186, 192, 196 identity politics backlash against, 133–134 conservative opposition to, 63, 66 and racial capitalism, 144 validity of, 135, 139–141

208

INDEX

ideology binarized understanding of, 10, 109–110, 119, 121 Galloway on, 97 and hegemony, 109, 111, 113–118 power and knowledge in, 169 ignorance, veil of, 136 Imaginary, the (Lacanian register) Althusser and, 113n9 and history of museums, 156 and ideology, 109, 112, 116–118, 120–121, 127 and post-truth, 172–173 and subjectivity, 162–164, 170 immanence, radical, 9 imperial debris, 146 incoherence, politics of, 98 Indigenous communities, 136, 142–148, 160 individualism, Jordan Peterson’s defence of, 64–66 information, and digitization, 95 Info Wars , 183 intellectual dark web, 193 interactivity, spontaneous, 19 interpellation, 3–4, 52, 54, 117–118 intersectionality, 58 IRA (Internet Research Agency), 193, 195 ISAs (Ideological State Apparatuses), 113n8, 117 J Jameson, Frederic, 97, 136–137 Jones, Alex, 185, 194 Jones, Van, 33 jouissance conspiratorial, 193 far-right, 182 and love, 46, 50, 53 populist, 177–178, 180, 185, 192, 196–197

technology mediating, 40, 42–43 use of term, 42 journalism as field, 10, 177–182, 184–185, 196, 197 and power, 179 social science and technocratic habitus of, 189–190 Trump as threat to, 183–184 journalistic habitus, 178 Judeo-Christianity, Peterson’s defence of, 65–66 Jung, Carl, 65, 66, 67–69, 71–73

K Kammern, 10, 156–161, 164–169, 171–173 Kant, Immanuel, 157–158, 160 King, Stephen, 126n14 Kittler, Friedrich, 52–53, 84–85, 87, 94 Klein, Ezra, 191 knowledge Baudrillard on, 71 and cultural artefacts, 53 discursive, 86, 155, 160 finiteness of, 84 hierarchies of, 34 Lacan on, 124 and museums, 164–166 Peterson on, 73–74 power over, 158, 169 of reality TV conventions, 28, 32 subject of, 46, 54 Kolozova, Katerina, 87 Kreigel, Elan, 192 Kunstkammern. See Kammern

L Lacan, Jacques, 9, 10

INDEX

Borromean Knot, 112–113, 118, 121 and cultural studies, 107–109 and Descartes, 43 on desire, 46–51, 53, 164 on knowledge and belief, 124 on language and speech, 52 and post-truth, 155, 171 and sexual relationships, 42, 44–46 and subjectivity, 117–118, 155, 160–162 lack, irreducible, 52 Laclau, Ernesto, 58, 108, 116n11 Lahoud, Adrian, 89 land rights, 145 language Lacan on, 121 and mediation theory, 85–87 and speech, 52 Laruelle, François, 80, 83, 85–86, 92n3–94n5, 101 theory of non-philosophy, 91–96 L’Etourdit , 42 Levy, Bernard-Henri, 181 liberal egalitarianism, 58, 63, 66 liberal governmentality, 88–89 liberalism, mathematics of, 89, 99 Linnaeus, Carl, 156, 158 Lippmann, Walter, 190 Loft Story, 18–21 lost object, 42 love desire for and impossibility of, 48–52 fantasy of, 40, 43 objects of, 39, 45, 48, 51 Lovink, Geert, 87, 89 M Maddow, Rachel, 186, 196 Manigault, Omarosa, 29 marginalisation, 10, 119, 132, 135–136, 141, 144, 146

209

Martin, Johnathan, 194 Marxism Althusserian, 3, 108 cultural, 111 and cultural studies, 2, 3 Gramscian, 114 humanist, 117 Laclau and Mouffe on, 58 and postmodernism, 58–60, 63, 65–68, 72, 73 Marx, Karl, 91, 143–144 Massey, Doreen, 4, 114–115, 137 mass media. See media corporations master signifier, 63, 164–165 Maté, Aaron, 195 materiality, 48, 92, 112–113, 124 McCain, John, 188 McGovern, George, 189 meaninglessness, 65, 66, 67–69 media, affective relationships with, 32–33 media capital, 178, 181–183, 185, 187, 196 media corporations, 19, 80, 86, 88, 98, 197 media culture, 8, 18, 19, 22–24, 29, 32 media entrepreneurs, 181, 182, 186, 192 media literacy, 111, 111n5, 120n12 media logic, heteronomous, 178, 180, 182, 186, 196 media technologies, 53, 80, 94 mediation and correlationism, 83, 97 digital, 86, 90, 94–98, 101 and technology, 80, 82, 85, 87 theories of, 83–88 Meillassoux, Quentin, 84, 90, 90n2 melodramatic storylines, 29, 32 meta-capital, 178, 181–182, 189, 190, 196 metaphysics

210

INDEX

of Baudrillard, 70 and the digital, 80, 83, 88, 89, 96–98 Laruelle on, 85 Meyer, Philip, 190 #MeToo, 8, 34 Miller, Jacques-Alain, 39 Mirror Stage, 161, 162 mockery, 21, 22, 62, 98 Mook, Robbie, 192 Moonves, Les, 184 Moore, Roy, 195 Morrison, Scott, 112n6 Mouffe, Chantal, 58, 108, 116n11 MSNBC , 178, 186 Mueller, Robert, 187 mugging, 2–3, 136–138 multiculturalism, 134, 138, 142–143 Murrow, Edward R., 178, 186, 197 museums, 10 and Kammern, 156–161, 165–168 as Master Signifier, 164, 172 Mussolini, Benito, 22–23, 114

N Name-of-the-Father, 163 nationalism conservative, 58 and racial capitalism, 142 white. See white supremacy natural history, 157–158, 166 natural world categorisation of, 156, 158, 160–161 race in, 135 nature Althusser’s complication of, 117 three kingdoms of, 159 negation as disavowal, 125–127 psychoanalytic approaches to, 109, 112–113, 122–124

neoliberal governmentality, 80, 99–101 neoliberalism decline of, 58 and journalistic field, 177, 180–181 and racial capitalism, 142–143 reset conjuncture of, 82, 100–101 and Trump, 16, 17, 81, 125 ‘Never-Trump’ Republicans, 179, 187–189, 197 New Right, 58, 60, 71, 74 New York Times appeal to truth, 184 cultural capital of, 177, 180 fact-checking by, 120, 154 Never-Trump Republicans at, 187–188 and reality television, 16–17 and Trump’s rhetoric, 132 Nicholls, Brett, 9 NK (New Knowledge), 194–196 non-mediation, 91, 99 non-philosophy, 91–93, 92n3, 96, 99, 101 non-truth, 79, 96, 184 North American Cultural Studies, 108 not-mother, 123–124 #NotMyPresident, 10, 109, 113, 125–127, 126 #NotOkay, 34 not-tags, 10, 109–110, 113, 125–127

O Obama, Barack, 125n13, 126, 194 object-form, 94 object-oriented ontology, 8–9 objet petit a, 113, 122–123, 127 observation and detection, register of, 25–29, 34 Occupy Movement, 100 Olympic Games, 5–7 ontology

INDEX

cultural and mathematical, 89 governing, 155 of love, 41 of mediation, 86 and technology, 52 onto-photo-logic, 93–94, 101 Orban, Viktor, 111 Oxford, Kelly, 34

P panel painting, 159 particularity, 139–141 patriarchy, 66–67, 73, 75, 95 patriotic centre, 178, 186, 188, 194 Pence, Mike, 31 Peterson, Jordan, 8, 57–59 characterised as calm, 63–64 description of reality, 64–68 on order and chaos, 69–71, 74 political arguments of, 59–61, 111 rise to prominence of, 71–72 Pfaller, Robert, 40, 43 phantasmagoria, 101 photography, and philosophy, 93 platform economy, 88, 90, 94 Pliny the Elder, 157, 160 political correctness, 60, 66 political representation, 16, 136 political, the, 177, 179, 184–185, 194–195 popular culture, 108n2 and Continental theory, 3 devaluation of, 32 and hegemony, 108, 112–113 reveal-of-the-real in, 110, 120–122 savviness and scepticism in, 29 populism right-wing, 80, 132, 148, 177 Trump and, 7 postmodern culture, tragic structure of feeling, 32

211

postmodernism characterised as emotional and feminine, 63–64 conservative antagonism to, 8–9, 60–63 Jameson on, 137 Jordan Peterson’s rhetoric against, 58–62, 66–69, 74 use of term, 57 postmodern turn, 1 post-reality, 17, 34 post-truth, 5, 8–10 and aesthetics, 79–83, 99–100 as attack on truth, 164, 168–169, 171–172 and communicative theories, 9, 85 conspiracy theory as, 96, 98 Donald Trump as, 153–154 epistemic conditions of, 84–85, 88, 94, 96 journalistic panic over, 177, 188 and neoliberalism, 100–101 and postmodernism, 5 use of term, 154–155 posturing, 111 power, field of, 179–180, 190, 194–196 Precision Journalism, 190 The President’s Show, 31–32 primitive accumulation, 142, 143 probability, in communication theory, 87–88 productive individuals, 100–101 pseudo-politics, 197 psychoanalysis and cultural studies, 108–110, 112 and emergence of subjectivity, 161 Kittler on, 52 Pulitzer Prize, 170, 182, 190 Putin, Vladimir, 10 Putnam, James, 168

212

INDEX

Q QAnon, 193 Quiccheberg, Samuel, 159 R race and class, 132, 138, 140, 143–144 and crime, 133–134, 148 and racism, 133–135, 143, 147 scholarly debate on, 133, 139–141 in settler colonies, 145–146 as social practice, 136 racial capitalism, 135, 141–144, 148 racial justice, 136, 142, 144 racial violence, 142, 146 racism and capitalism, 95, 99, 140. See also racial capitalism and culturalism, 134 and Donald Trump, 18, 24, 28, 125, 132–133 historical legacies of, 148 political economy of, 142 randomness, 69, 88 rationalism, 160, 169, 186 rationality, 63, 72, 84, 155 and fanaticism, 84 reaction shots, 33 Read, Jason, 100 The Real First Family of D.C., 15–16 reality and aesthetics, 81 Baudrillard on, 74–75 crisis of, 5–7, 18 Hall on, 86 Jordan Peterson as defending, 58, 60–62, 64 mediations of, 1, 7–8, 16 neoliberal, 79–82 reality television, 7–9, 16 and Donald Trump, 16–17, 19–20, 25

as grotesque, 24 observation and detection in, 25–27 and performance of governance, 16–17, 35 resonance and affect in, 32–33 spectacularization and savviness in, 29–32 real, the and reality television, 16, 25, 29 fact-checking as revealing, 9, 109–111, 119–123, 126 Laruelle on, 91–96 Real, the (Lacanian register), 9–10, 108, 112–113, 118, 122–124, 127 reason, opposed to emotion, 63 receipts, 110, 110n4 Reddit, 60, 61, 71 reflexivity, 31 refugees, 136, 132–134, 144–148 repetition-compulsion, 5 representation, doubling of finality of, 84 repression, 113, 123–127 ‘The Resistance’, 179, 186, 197 resonance/affect, register of, 32–34 reveal-of-the-real logic. See real, the, fact-checking as revealing rights, denial of, 132, 144, 148 Rizkalla, Alex, 168 Robinson, Cedric, 143 Romney, Mitt, 31 Rove, Karl, 186 RSAs (repressive state apparatuses), 113n8, 118, 124 12 Rules for life, 59 rulers, objects celebrating, 159 ruptural fusion, 4 Russia, suspected involvement in US politics, 177, 179, 186–187, 189, 193–197

INDEX

S satire, 29–32 Saturday Night Live, 31 science, and power, 58 self-commodification, 182 self-deception, 40, 44 self-regulation, 88–89 servitude, voluntary, 19 sexual relationship, impossibility of, 40–43, 45 Shannon, C. E., 80, 86–88, 99 Sheridan, Greg, 62–63 Shirky, Clay, 192 signification chains of, 164–165 as masking, 109 types of, 98 signifier, vaunting of, 109 Silver, Nate, 191–192 simulacra, 20, 29 simulation, 6 of ideological regime, 97 orders of, 87 of politics, 21 Skeggs, Beverly, 32 slavery, 134, 142, 146 Snopes , 16 social capital, 180 social media, 2 fakeness and realness in, 7–8 representations on, 10 social networking sites (SNS). See Facebook; social media; Twitter social order Hall on, 87, 137 Peterson and Baudrillard on, 9, 66, 69–72, 74 social science, computational view of, 179, 189–190 sociology, new, 193, 197 sovereignty grotesque, 23–25, 33–35

213

individual, 158 originary fiction of, 145 and race, 146 spectacularization/savviness, register of, 25, 29–32, 34 Sri Lanka, 131 Stephens, Brett, 188 subaltern, the, 10, 114 subject, double, 116 subjectivity Althusser on, 116 emergence of, 161–164 in neoliberalism, 100–101 Subject-Supposed-to-Know, 171–172 Symbolic, the (Lacanian register) Althusser and, 113n9 and ideology, 109, 112, 116–122, 125 and museums, 156, 164–166, 168–169 and post-truth, 172–173 and subjectivity, 161–164, 170 Systema Naturae, 156

T Tapper, Jake, 186 technocracy, 178, 181–182, 184–186, 189, 192–194, 195–196 technology and autonomy, 52–53 and fantasy of love, 39–43, 45 integration into everyday life, 9 as organising principle, 164 as the Other, 54 techno-utopianism, 179, 182, 189–192 telemorphosis, 9, 17 Baudrillard on, 19–22 paradox of, 25 and savviness, 29 State of, 23–25, 34 temporalities, multiple, 138

214

INDEX

Tertrais, Bruno, 5 Thatcherism, 3, 115, 148 Thumin, Nancy, 32 Tornatore, Giuseppe, 9, 39 Toulet, Maissa, 168 transference, 39, 48 transgender, Jordan Peterson against, 59 transparency, and conspiracy, 96 Trump, Donald as aftermath of GFC, 100 in The Apprentice, 19–20 defying technocracy, 192 and fake news, 111 as fake president, 21–22, 109, 125–127 and fragility of neoliberalism, 81 as grotesque, 23–25, 28 journalistic responses to, 185–188, 195–197 and media logic, 177–179, 185–187 and political elite, 126n15 and post-truth, 153–155, 169–171 as reality TV president, 9, 15–18 and social media, 8 techniques of reality TV used against, 25–33 Trumpisms, 8, 133 Trump, Melania, 16, 20, 31 truth, 153 cultural capital of, 178 and data production, 193 economy of, 89 journalistic, 179, 181, 183–185, 189, 195 Laruelle on, 91 Peterson as defending against postmodernism, 60–63, 65 and power, 60, 154–155, 172–173 production of, 86 regimes of, 63, 83, 88, 90, 96–97 Right-wing populist, 185–186

technologies of, 22, 25, 27, 178 truthfulness, appeal to, 5–6 Turner, Graeme, 18 Twitter anti-Trump memes on, 17, 26–27, 31 and Jordan Peterson, 63–64 Trump on, 5, 126, 154, 183

U UK Independence Party, 111 United States, racism in foundations of, 134 universalism, strategic, 139

V violence cultural, 136 symbolic, 177, 180, 185 virality, 178, 182, 196 Vishmidt, Marina, 100 visibility, economy of, 32 vision-force, 94 Vogl, Joseph, 100 Vox, 191

W Watergate, 21, 181, 187 Weaver, Warren, 88 Weiss, Bari, 188 Western civilisation, 66–68, 72–74, 145. See also Judeo-Christianity, Peterson’s defence of Western episteme, 80, 84, 96, 99 Western metaphysics, 83, 96 white noise, 54–55 white supremacy, 58, 63, 139, 142 white working-class, 132 Williams, Raymond, 3 Wolf, Michael, 183

INDEX

Wood, Helen, 32 Working Papers , 107, 115–116 Wunderkammern. See Kammern X xenophobia, 133–134 Y YouTube, Jordan Peterson on, 59–60

215

Z Žižek, Slavoj, 43, 108n2 on Althusser, 118 and cultural studies, 108 debate with Peterson, 67 on fantasy, 48 on negation, 122–124 Zupanˇciˇc, Alenka, 42, 109, 122–124, 127