The Fact of the Matter About the Post-Truth Condition: Response to Sassower

Abstract

This article responds to Raphael Sassower’s critique of my recent A Player’s Guide to the Post-Truth Condition. It addresses his concerns that I do not align myself sufficiently with Foucault and Critical Theory more generally. The article points out that notwithstanding my indebtedness to these sources, one cannot properly understand the post-truth condition without taking seriously the robust sense of freedom that today’s two dominant ideologies—Neoliberalism and Neo-Populism—presuppose in their various political-economic-social struggles. The article relates this point to several of the key concepts underwriting my conception of post-truth, including Modal Power and the Symmetry Principle. The article ends with an account of the current “reparationist” discourse (i.e., repairing the intergenerational damage of transatlantic slavery) that makes it exemplary of the post-truth condition.

The most interesting feature of Sassower’s (2023) considered review of my second post-truth book (Fuller 2018, chap. 3; 2020, chap. 4) is that among the many issues raised in the book—which he admits makes it difficult to review—he picks up on the ones that were most salient forty years ago when we began our respective philosophical journeys. Put another way, he reviews the book from the standpoint of a mainstream postmodern Western thinker in the 1980s. But since then, the world has changed a lot—not entirely, of course—but enough that Sassower misses some of the nuance in my argument. I will draw these out, not to seek agreement with him but to expose our differences more plainly.

Nowadays people of my generation—not only Sassower—often sound like somewhat disappointed music fans who would prefer to hear the old songs from their favorite bands. Specifically, Sassower is not alone in his frustration that I do not talk more about Michel Foucault. This was a common complaint about my first post-truth book (e.g., Baxi 2019; Mason-Wilkes 2019). To be sure, I have been strongly influenced by Foucault, especially his early work (i.e., before The History of Sexuality), which I have acknowledged from my original writings on social epistemology to my more recent transhumanist forays. However, Foucault’s usefulness is limited. He was studiously neutral in his approach to normativity, which reflected an epistemic orientation that aspired to be objective without aiming at some transcendent conception of truth. It was meant to be a cool and sophisticated response to Jean-Paul Sartre’s engagé Marxisante stance that the worldwide student revolts of the late 1960s popularized.

But the political pose quickly became a theoretical position and once it hit the Anglosphere it became an object of academic fascination. Like his friend Derrida, Foucault made a point of dealing with history “archaeologically” and “genealogically” but never “teleologically.” In their telling, “truth” is simply a regime dedicated to organizing “traces” of objects whose identities are never fully revealed. In the case of the various forms of “discipline” imposed on Homo sapiens, it remained an open question for Foucault exactly which conception of humanity these traces have been meant to uphold. And without denying the virtuosity of Foucault’s historical analyses, in the end he treated everything he touched as a corpse. Indeed, much of the frisson surrounding Foucault’s early reception (e.g., The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge) was due to his self-positioning as the coroner who can do no more than return an open verdict on how humanity has died.

Fast forward a half-century, and now amid the excruciatingly slow death of “critical theory,” it is easy to see how Sassower and others can mistake Foucault’s metaphysically profound detachment from the human condition for “critique” of the sort that motivated the late 1960s student revolts. Blinded-sided by both poles of today’s political dialectic—neoliberalism and neo-populism—critical theorists are largely left talking to each other, each trying to outdo the other in characterizing the challenges they face to be heard properly. Moreover, the public face of critical theory has been reduced to being “othered” by the two dominant political movements. Whereas neoliberals see critical theory as the ideological front of an embarrassingly nostalgic “Leftism” (e.g., Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, Jean-Luc Melenchon, Oskar Lafontaine) that needlessly galvanizes the populace, the neo-populists treat critical theory as the virulently “woke” agenda lurking behind neoliberalism’s bland bureaucratic façade. Meanwhile, both sides have appropriated the tools of critical theory for their own purposes, while avoiding critical theory’s highly attenuated conception of freedom—sometimes reduced to mere “contingency”—that is predicated on pre-existing “structures of domination” reproducing themselves in all forms of human interaction.

Indeed, notwithstanding their profound disagreements, neoliberals and neo-populists agree that freedom is the name of the game. This agreement helps to explain the highly moralistic and frequently emotional tone of both sides. I have discussed this as a distinction in political registers, which Vilfredo Pareto characterized in terms of “lions” and “foxes,” that is, a defensive establishment and offensive insurgents (Fuller 2018, Introduction). In this context, accusations of “post-truth” are designed to blame the opponent for the heightened emotionalism, as in “We are the reasonable guys, but you are the ones blinded by emotion.” Here the specter of “critical theory” makes the two sides seem crazier than they really are: Neoliberalism may not be so “Left” and neo-populism not so “Right” as each has come to project the other. Nevertheless, both sides are worried that the other is in the business of deliberately trying to restrict the sphere of freedom. I characterize the sphere of freedom in terms of modal power, referring to the topic of “modality” in metaphysics, because one’s capacity to act is ultimately determined by what one takes to be possible. And indeed, there is a sense in which by attempting to exercise modal power, the neoliberals and the neo-populists do aim to restrict the sphere of freedom. But each side would regard its own actions along these lines as simply governing the world in accordance with the “truth,” which involves being “realistic” about what is possible.

Of course, Foucault had shown that the limits of what is possible has shifted over time (aka “episteme” or “historical a priori”). But in his telling, the humans populating these regimes of modal power are less architects of their own fate than producers of discursive and bodily traces of the regimes in question—as if for the benefit of their after-the-fact analysts, so cynics might say. Here Foucault and I part metaphysical company. He insisted on describing everything from the standpoint of the dominant regime at the time and place under study—once again, understood as something whose time has passed. However, this absolute perspective has seemed “critical” to his admirers because regimes differ as one’s gaze moves in time and space. Thus, one could be looking at the same phenomena from a different but equally absolute perspective, whereby the phenomena appear in a more positive or negative light. This is all epistemologically sound, if the gazer is detached from the objects of study, which are themselves subject to systemic governance with a fixed setting—or “thermostat,” in cybernetic terms. However, once the power of the gaze is broken, which in this context is like breaking the “fourth wall” in theatre, we enter properly into the post-truth condition. I discuss this in A Player’s Guide to the Post-Truth Condition as “metalepsis” (Fuller 2020, chap. 13).

The conclusion that follows is quite contrary to the spirit of both Marx and Foucault. Instead of the workers reappropriating the master’s tools for their own purposes, imagine both the masters and workers reappropriating their analysts’ tools—say, Marxist or Foucauldian ones—to make the analysts part of their already existing struggles. This consummate post-truth situation was prefigured in Luigi Pirandello’s landmark 1921 play, Six Characters in Search of an Author, in which partially scripted characters escape the mind of a playwright suffering from writer’s block and proceed to invade another play in rehearsal where they attempt to work out the plot for themselves in the new dramatic environment. Of course, the theatre director is not pleased, which results in a struggle over the frame of reference for making sense of all the action on stage. This is also how to understand such US Alt-Right ideologues as Andrew Breitbart and Steve Bannon when they adopt the language of “demystification” and “deconstruction” to undermine the credibility of, so to speak, “native” critical theory speakers. (There may be a lesson here for the political future of English, whose global dominance is largely due to the number of second language speakers).

This general strategy is consonant with the signature epistemological contribution of Science and Technology Studies, namely, the “symmetry principle” (Fuller 2018, chap. 3; 2020, chap. 4). In A Player’s Guide, inspired by Bishop Berkeley’s “To be is to be perceived,” I give the principle some ontological bite: “To be is to be redeployable” (Fuller 2020, 4–5). Unfortunately, while Sassower picks up on this point, he does not seem to get it. He thinks that I am disregarding the role of evidence in argumentation. On the contrary, I am saying that the factual nature of evidence depends on its ability to be deployed by both sides of the argument; hence, the symmetry principle. In the post-truth condition, it is painfully obvious that opposing viewpoints often mobilize the same body of evidence to their own advantage as they each try to “name the game” they are playing, according to which one side then turns out to win and the other lose. This point is perhaps best seen in the different kinds of histories written by “winners” and “losers.” Losers often write as if there will be a future rematch, when the rules of the game will be to their advantage (Fuller 2023b).

In short, post-truth is not the denial of a pre-existent (“realist”) truth; rather, it is the “state of nature” that exists prior to the construction of a truth regime. The Sophists did not destroy Plato’s Republic; rather, Plato invented the Republic to end once and for all (so he wished) the chaos caused by the Sophists. Thus, Foucault was correct to insist that truth regimes need to be actively maintained if they are to have any longevity at all. In this context, his friends Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze can be understood as stressing that a truth regime’s efforts at self-maintenance will always generate its own forms of differences (aka “othering”), neither by choice nor necessity but as an unintended consequence—what biologists mean by “mutation.” It is a historicized version of what Freud called the “return of the repressed.” Notwithstanding his admiration for Foucault, Sassower thinks that post-truth is the one that generates unintended consequences, when in fact truth generates them by effectively repressing the default post-truth character of reality.

Part of the problem here is that Sassower also wants to read me through the late Bruno Latour, whom I debated twice—and respect as an early influence on my thinking (i.e., before We Have Never Been Modern). However, Latour’s “matters of concern”—as opposed to “matters of fact”—do not concern me much. I am more concerned with the co-production of reality, which appears as facts of the matter that those holding opposing positions regard as resources common to their struggle. Pace later Latour (and today’s Sassower), far from being fragile, facts can sustain considerable contextual transformation. Indeed, facts are the “immutable mobiles” advanced by early Latour (1987). The endless reconfiguration of statistical data perhaps best exemplifies the point. It is difficult to determine who is “right” or “wrong” in their appeal to the same set of numbers unless there is agreement on the terms of engagement. The post-truth condition is about such “rules of the game” being themselves contested at the same time as the specific winners and losers of those games. The result is a state of profound indeterminacy. Like a 3-D chess match, one may be winning at one game but losing at another, and at any given moment it is difficult to know which game is dominant. In this context, all generally recognized empirical data—not just statistics—function as ammunition in wars whose playing fields are continually shifting. Here let us recall Latour’s hostility to the “reflexive” turn in Science and Technology Studies in the late 1980s, which adumbrated our post-truth condition by drawing attention to the co-production of games and their outcomes as “degree zero” of social life (Latour 1988).

I would be remiss not to comment on the moralism that pervades Sassower’s critique of A Player’s Guide, which often substitutes for substantive argumentation. By fiat, he declares that there are “good” and “bad” actors in the various ongoing controversies that beset public life. Some people tell the truth, others lie and deceive. There are those who deploy their expertise for good and others for “blatantly nefarious” ends. While we cannot say for sure who knows the truth, we know who is getting closer to it—largely because they are the ones “really” trying to do so, which in turn is what Sassower seems to mean by “science,” apparently with the blessing of Karl Popper. As this inventory suggests, there is more than a hint of question-begging in how Sassower makes his case against me. Nevertheless, it beautifully illustrates the post-truth style of reasoning that even its putative opponents feel compelled to adopt these days.

A good example is Sassower’s treatment of my criticism of the fabled “Mertonian norms” of scientific conduct, especially “communism”—or “communalism,” as Merton later called it for Cold War consumption (Fuller 2020, chap. 7). Instead of focusing on my reason for opposing the norms (even understood as “aspirational”), he alights upon the anomic individualism that he thinks follows from my opposition. In fact, I criticize Merton mainly for his fiendishly false misnaming of science’s collective character as “communist” (or “communalist”) rather than corporatist, which is what he really meant. (Classical rhetoric would credit Merton’s verbal ploy as catachresis.) In short, science is owned by the scientific community as a corporate body, who in turn licenses talk about science to properly certified “experts,” to whose authority the public is then meant to defer. The result is to remove scientific knowledge from the domain of public goods. In my next book, I pursue this phenomenon of academic rentiership in some detail (Fuller 2023a, chaps. 5–6).

Finally, Sassower’s moralism reaches fever pitch when he calls me “racist” for suggesting that the slaves involved in the transatlantic slave trade may be somehow complicit in their slavery (Fuller 2020, chap. 11). I did not raise the point simply to be provocative. There is the methodological question of whether it is empirically reasonable to stipulate that several generations of people living under a variety of conditions called “slavery” have been all equally subject to the same power relations. Even the legal definition of “slavery,” which seems relatively clear, has widely varied in the terms and conditions of its enforcement. Moreover, there is the question of the options originally available to those taken into European slavery. Sometimes the alternative was African slavery. But would even a non-slave existence have been particularly “free” in the modern political sense? And once we get beyond the first couple of generations of slavery, the normalized co-dependency of masters and slaves complicates whatever principled objections one might have against slavery as an institution, since one then needs to envisage the cost of ending the relationship—and the effects that might have on the prospects of rebuilding post-slavery relationships among the same people. “Bumpy ride” understates the historical record.

I raise all these points because we live in a time when the idea of “reparations” for such past injustices as the transatlantic slave trade is in vogue. The case for reparations normally involves a straightforward transfer of assets from the descendants of the masters to the descendants of the slaves, based on the heroic assumption that the same or equivalent assets would have been generated by the slaves, had they not been taken into slavery. It is difficult to see how such claims on their face could stand up in a court of law. But that is not the point. The reparationists will not win by allowing opposing lawyers to scrutinize the counterfactual reasoning and its financial implications that constitute their claims. Indeed, US President Joe Biden’s former Science and Technology advisor made her reputation by showing that such claims can barely get out of the starting gate, once DNA evidence is introduced in courts to decide who counts as a “descendant” of a slave (Nelson 2016). Nevertheless, there remains the symbolism of transferring assets from White-looking people to non-White-looking people, which has been boosted by revisionist historical backstories, notably the Pulitzer-Prize-winning “1619 Project,” originally published in The New York Times.

As someone sanguine about our post-truth condition, I have no problem whatsoever with historical revisionism—and I see its point. In this case, it is about generating a climate of sympathy to compensate for the shortcomings of the reparationist claim on strictly legal grounds. The 1619 Project and related efforts are high-minded attempts at shaming, with the expectation of an out of court settlement, whereby the “Whites” pay out something—probably far short of the full reparations demanded—if only to avoid the endless stream of bad publicity linking persistent Black disadvantage to a history of White oppression. It is an especially exquisite form of intellectual extortion, which here works by rethinking the past to reopen the future. Normally, intellectual extortion works by closing down the future to reinforce the past, as in a Kant-style transcendental argument (Fuller 2023b). In either case, it is a modal power move. For my own part, I would like to see a massive reparationist claim properly argued out in court, where both parties proceed to present their respective cases shamelessly, with a judge or jury deciding the outcome. But then again, maybe I am a “truther” at heart.