A pre-history of post-truth, East and West. By MARCI SHORE
Postmodernism was
conceived largely by the Left as a safeguard against totalizing ideologies. Yet
today, it has been appropriated on behalf of an encroaching neo-totalitarianism
of the Right. Is French literary theory to blame? And can a philosophy of
dissent developed in communist eastern Europe offer an antidote?
Kto vinovat?
Who is to blame? ‘Blaming is irresponsible’, Agnes Heller answers, ‘It is
responsibility that should be taken. It is responsibility
that must be taken.’ In eastern Europe, the philosophy of dissent was a
philosophy of responsibility. ‘Patočka used to say,’ Havel wrote in ‘The Power
of the Powerless’, ‘that the most interesting thing about responsibility is
that we carry it with us everywhere. That means that responsibility is ours,
that we must accept it and grasp it here, now.’
In 2014, Russian
historian Andrei Zubov was fired from his Moscow professorship for comparing
Putin’s annexation of Crimea to Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland. Two
years later, at a festival in the post-industrial Czech city of Ostrava, Zubov
spoke to a large audience about the task of historians. ‘My dolzhni govorit’
pravdu’, he said. We should speak the truth. This
declaration – all the more so when uttered in Zubov’s baritone – sounded
quaint, even old-fashioned. In particular, the Slavic word pravda –
truth – invoked with no qualification and no prefix, suggested a bygone era.
Who believed in truth anymore?
The end of ‘The End of
History’ arrived together with the end of belief in reality. The Cold War world
was a world of warring ideologies; in the twenty-first century, both American
capitalism and post-Soviet oligarchy employ the same public relations
specialists catering to gangsters with political ambitions. As Peter
Pomerantsev described in Nothing is True and Everything is Possible,
in the Russia of the 2000s, distinguishing between truth and lies became passé.
In this world of enlightened, postmodern people, ‘everything is PR’.
Reality television has
rendered obsolete the boundary between the fictional and the real. Truth is a
constraint that has been overcome; ‘post-truth’ has been declared ‘word of the
year.’ In Washington, the White House shamelessly defends its ‘alternative
facts’. At the beginning, American journalists were taken off-guard: they had
been trained to confirm individual pieces of information, not to confront a
brazen untethering from empirical reality. The New Yorker captured
the desperation with a satire about the fact-checker who passed out from
exhaustion after the Republican debate. He had to be hospitalized; apparently
no one replaced him.
In any moment of
crisis, a long Russian tradition poses two ‘eternal questions’. The
first: Kto vinovat? Who is to blame? Did postmodernism’s
critique of the ontological stability of truth unwillingly create the
conditions of possibility for ‘post-truth’, now exploited by oligarchic regimes
on both sides of the Atlantic? Is French literary theory and its ‘narcissistic
obscurantism’ at fault? ‘I am no doubt not the only one who writes in
order to have no face,’ wrote Michel Foucault. ‘Do not ask who I am and do not
ask me to remain the same.’ Was it not always suspicious that literary theorists
like Paul de Man and Hans Robert Jauss – each of whom had a vested personal
interest in disassociating his youthful wartime self from his post-war
scholarly self – elaborate so passionately a philosophy of the inconstancy of
the I, the nonexistence of a stable subject, stable meaning, stable truth? Does
Jacques Derrida not bear some responsibility for Vladimir Putin?
The second eternal
question: Chto delat’? What is to be done? Is there an
antidote to postmodernity? If so, where can we search for it? ‘Postmodernity’ has a
history. It came not from nowhere, but rather from ‘modernity,’ which in Europe
historians have traditionally dated from the eighteenth-century French
Enlightenment. In the beginning, God was merely sidelined, relegated to a minor
role as human reason took centre stage. ‘Sapere Aude! “Have courage
to use your own understanding!” – that is the motto of enlightenment,’ Immanuel
Kant famously wrote. Later (in the 1880s, to be precise), God was killed
off entirely (speculatively by Dostoevsky, definitively by Nietzsche). Now the
philosophical stakes of compensating for an emasculated-turned-nonexistent God
became still greater. God had fulfilled epistemological, ontological and
ethical roles; his death left an enormous empty space. Much of modern
philosophy can be described as an attempt to replace God, to find a path to
absolute truth in God’s absence.
The search for a path
to truth was the search for a bridge: from subject to object, inner to outer,
consciousness to world, thought to Being… read more:
http://www.eurozine.com/a-pre-history-of-post-truth-east-and-west/
see also
Andrew
Calcutt: The surprising origins of ‘post-truth’ – and how it was spawned by the
liberal left
Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson - Revisiting Foucault and the Iranian Revolution
Farewell to reality
Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson - Revisiting Foucault and the Iranian Revolution
Farewell to reality
Articles on ideology in East Europe
