Post-Truth Archives - Public Seminar

North America

Everything Associated with January 6 Is a Performance

Televised government hearings are political theater: make Americans watch by assembling a star-studded cast

January 6, 2022 • by Peter Nohrnberg

January 6 was broadcast on live TV, bringing the performativity of Trump partisans to many Americans who had never experienced their theatrical quality. The costumes, the flags, the signage, and the face-paint compelled and stunned many viewers....

Everything Associated with January 6 Is a Performance

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The Political and Intellectual Entanglements of Post-Truth

A review of Steve Fuller’s Post-Truth: Knowledge as Power Game

September 18, 2019 • by Pietro Daniel Omodeo

Three years after the Oxford English Dictionary made the term "post-truth" the word of the year, we still live in a time in which, according to the definition, “objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” As both Nicholas Baer and Maggie ...

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How Does Animation Change our Concept of Life and What Kind of Ethics Does it Require?

A Conversation with Media Historian and Theorist Deborah Levitt

October 26, 2018 • by Deborah Levitt and Bettine Josties

Public Seminar (PS): Deborah, in your recently published book The Animatic Apparatus. Animation, Vitality, and the Futures of the Image you claim that animation is the dominant medium of our time and propose the concept of the animatic apparatus as a dispositif, that is, as a kind of organizing mechanics for contemporary culture. Can ...

How Does Animation Change our Concept of Life and What Kind of Ethics Does it Require?

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Reflections on the Development of a Post-truth Regime

Donald Trump and the politically correct

July 27, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

"The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas; i.e., the class which is the ruling material force in society is at the same time the ruling intellectual force.” Marx and Engels, The German Ideology We sociologists know that each idea, each creative expression, each truth claim appears ...

Reflections on the Development of a Post-truth Regime

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Post-truth or Moral Truth?

The populist claim to authenticity

May 31, 2018 • by Lone Sorensen

“Enemy agents” is how the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) described the media in 2015. The EFF are an increasingly influential populist opposition party in South Africa, famous for their disruptive action and their calls for former president Jacob Zuma to #PayBackTheMoney he allegedly embezzled. In their attacks on the press ...

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Who Needs Big Brother?

Post-truth, populism, and the crisis of public communication

May 30, 2018 • by Silvio Waisbord

The following is a summary of remarks delivered at the 2018 Jay Blumler Lecture, University of Leeds. Western democracies have been in a constant state of crisis for decades now. It is hard to remember when there was no crisis. In their landmark book, The Crisis of Public Communication (1995), Blumler and Gurevitch ...

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The Face of ‘Post-Truth’ Politics

Observations from the trenches

May 2, 2018 • by Mykola Balaban

‘Post-truth’ is a concept that has been much discussed in recent years. But what is it like to experience its effects for real? Mykola Balaban, a history student and soldier, describes how it feels to be attacked with ‘non-existent’ rockets, and how one can come to doubt even one’s own ...

Uncategorized

Populism Through Uprooted Truths

The resiliency of Erdogan and the AKP

March 27, 2018 • by Can Mert Kökerer

This is an attempt to tell and explain the “success” story of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its founder Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the current President of the Republic of Turkey. They came to power in 2002, following economic and political crises in the previous decade. The party and ...

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A Pre-History of Post-truth

East and West

September 1, 2017 • by Marci Shore

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 ...

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Why Nietzsche is Not Responsible for Donald Trump

The Post-Truth Perspective

August 31, 2017 • by Emmanuel Alloa

This is a true story. The acclaimed TV series Fargo starts off exactly in the same way as the movie of the same name in 1996. Just as the cult film by the Coen brothers, the TV drama whose first season was aired in 2014 displays the warning “This is a true story.” ...

Why Nietzsche is Not Responsible for Donald Trump

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Who’s Afraid of the Post-factual?

From Alternative Truth to True Alternatives

July 9, 2017 • by Emmanuel Alloa

Kellyanne Conway, the advisor to President Donald Trump, must be credited for having coined a new philosophical concept: alternative facts. When confronted with the episode in which White House press Secretary Sean Spicer had grossly misstated the figures concerning the people present at the presidential inauguration, Conway disputed that Spicer ...