POST-TRUTH's
intellectual
geology features
      the
CONTEMPORARY
                             CULTURE

No less than any other age, the Post-Truth era has its own intellectual geology – a basis in the post modern philosophy of the late twentieth century, often abstruse and impenetrable, that has been popularised and distilled to the point that it is recognisable – albeit without attribution – in many features of contemporary culture.

Post-modernist thinking encouraged the idea that an increasingly pluralist society would need to acknowledge and heed multiple voices: the stories of gender, ethnic minorities, sexual orientation and cultural tradition. Post-modern thinkers such as Richard Ashley, Derrida and Foucault urged their readers to question and deconstruct language, visual idiom, institutions and received wisdom, and to ask how words, stories, art and architecture might enshrine forms of power and hegemony to which we would otherwise remain blind.

Post-modern philosophers preferred to understand language and culture as SOCIAL CONSTRUCTS, political phenomena that reflected the distribution of power across class, race, gender and sexuality, rather than the abstract ideals of classical philosophy. And if everything is a SOCIAL CONSTRUCT, then who is to say what is false? What is to stop the purveyor of 'fake news' from claiming to be a digital desperado, fighting the wicked 'hegemony' of the mainstream media?

From the start, the opponents of post-modernism objected that it was no more than a falshy repackaging of an ancient argument between believers in truth and relativists. In the fifth century BC, the Thracian philosopher Protagoras had argued that man is the measure of all things and that anything 'is to me such as it appears to me, and is to you such as it appears to you'.

Nietzsche had gone much further, insisting that human nature was positively hostile to the notion of TRUTH :

In man this art of simulation reaches its peak... the constant fluttering around the single flame of vanity is so much the rule and the law that almost nothing is more incomprehensible than how an honest and pure urge for truth could have arisen among men.

They are deeply immersed in illusions and dream images; their eye glides only over the surface of things and sees ‘forms‘; their feeling nowhere leads into truth, but contents itself with the reception of stimuli, playing, as it were, a game of blind man's buff on the banks of things.

The great American psychologist and philosopher William James made a similar point in less excitable language:

Reality 'indipendent' of human thinking is a thing very hard to find. It reduces to the notion of what is just entering into experience and yet to be named, or else to some imagined aboriginal presence in experience, before any belief about the presence had arisen, before any human conception had been applied.

It is what is absolutely dumb and evanescent, the more ideal limit of our minds... If so vulgar an expression were allowed us, we might say that wherever we find it, it has already been faked.

In other words: the subversion of truth as an attainable ideal is as old as philosophy itself. What the 'po-mo' theorists did was to present a new kind of relativism, fit for and inspired by, its times.

In his book The Post modern Condition, first published in 1979, the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard proposed 'an incredulity towards meta-narratives' – the grand narratives that had underpinned philosophy since Enlightenment – and the very idea of TRUTH-VALUE.

Baudrillard was drawn to the science of signs, or semiotics. In his best-known work, Simulacra and Simulation (1981), he argued:

                We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning... Despite efforts to renject message and content, meaning is lost and devoured faster than it can be reninjected...

Everywhere socialization is measured by the exposure to media messages.

Whoever is underexposed to the media is desocialized or virtually asocial... where we think that information produces meaning, the opposite occurs.

Communications technology, in other words, would subvert our inherited notions of real. Baudrillard's prophecy of social media becoming both a message of belonging and a source of disinformation – 'fake news' – was made eight years before Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, twenty-five before the creation of Twitter.

Source:[1]