The notion of post-truth politics has been insufficiently conceptualized, leaving its empirical viability questionable. As a response to this uncertainty, I seek to elaborate a concept of post-truth politics by comparing facts to public infrastructure, which I understand in an Arendtian fashion: as a condition that both limits and enables opinionated debate. I put forward an understanding of post-truth as a two-sided process brought about by mutually dependent structural factors contributing to the irrelevance of factual truths and a particular political style labelled careless speech. I place post-truth in a historical context and seek to distinguish it, particularly, from Harry Frankfurt's ‘bullshit’. Bullshit works within the mindset of carefully crafted advertisement-speak. Careless speech seeks to create confusion and bring democratic debate to a halt. I also explicate some key economic, cultural, and media-related factors that contribute to the emergence of post-truth politics. The third section discusses effective practices of conveying truth in the public sphere. I critically analyze fact-checking, (Foucauldian) fearless speech ( parrhesia) and storytelling, contrasting them to ‘careless speech’, and emphasize the need to address political structures in addition to more epistemologically-oriented solutions. I conclude with reflections on the economic-cultural background to factual infrastructure's disrepair, and highlight some future lines of inquiry in IR and Political Science.
For Hannah Arendt, some of the most distinctive features of the modern age derived from the adoption of a process-imaginary in science, history, and administration. This article examines Arendt’s work, identifying what it calls the ‘process-frame’ in her criticism of imperialism, economy, and the biologization of politics. It discusses an interpretation in which ‘natality’ presents a completely alternative mode of temporality, a resistance to the process-frame. This interpretation, it is argued, needs to be specified by taking into account that political action both interrupts and starts processes of its own. To confine and overcome the negative effects of process-framing, it is important to emphasize action as a world-building activity – something capable of establishing a relatively stable area of the common world by initiating processes of its own. Second, it is also important to cultivate ways of thinking and perceiving particular acts as meaningfully independent of all-embracing processes.
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