Productive Forces of Post-Truth(s)?

Abstract

Despite efforts to re-establish epistemological order, a litany of fake websites, media misrepresentation, “rumor bombs,” hoaxes, fake news, plagiarisms, and fabricated subjects document the emergence of a post-truth era. Increasing amount of scholarship is shared and distributed in media and thus the truth-value of (qualitative) inquiry also depends on the general discourses and practices operating in this contemporary post-truth era. Although critical thought is prized as the vehicle for advancing understandings, the scholarly literature does little to critically deconstruct the nature of post-truth(s) or question post-truth assumptions, to arrive at alternative conclusions and productive possibilities of our post-truth era. Following many poststructuralist thinkers, we then seek a deconstructive approach that first exposes and then subverts our implicit assumptions and dominant ways of thinking about truth, un-truth, and post-truth. In particular, we first consider broad conditions that shaped post-truth, while focusing on social media as a means and an ends to our obsession over “truth.” To destabilize post-truth assumptions, we then introduce mental comfort stories and critically question whether a pre-truth world ever existed. Next we discuss limitations of truth-regimes, academia, “truth” carnivals, and truth telling. Finally, we consider heterotopic spaces, such as social media, in leveraging onto-epistemological possibilities of post-truth era. To speak to the methodological audiences more broadly we call for a different space for (non)methodologies, theories, subjects, and objects in parallel flux with the complex, unpredictable, and increasingly dense post-truth world we live in.

Fragments of Truth and Post-Truth: An Associative Collage

“…Post-Truthers would concur with views that “News similar to qualitative research and knowledge can be both accurate and inaccurate” and that all narratives can be sincere and falsified (see Koro-Ljungberg et al, 2019, p. 588). Such views endorse research as potentially “fallible” despite our attempts to be as accurate and sincere and truthful as possible (see Williams, 2002/2004).…”

“…However, my distinction between post-Truth and post-truth emphasizes a somewhat different stance from that expressed by those who “seek to challenge the pessimistic views of the post-truth world” even though they “stand neither for nor against (that) post-truth world.” However, these others do sound like Post-Truthers (in my sense of that term) when they criticize obsessions over the nature of “truth” itself. They sound even more like Post-Truthers when they describe post-truth as “a phenomenon (which) illustrates the over-determined nature of ‘objective’ or absolute truth itself” (see Koro-Ljungberg et al, 2019, pp. 584–585).…”

“…. (in order) to continually refashion the rules of the truth game” (see Foucault, 1980 and Koro-Ljungberg et al, 2019, p. 588). Indeed, the major questions we are faced with in this pernicious age of post-truth are, consequently, those posed by the Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter: As a citizen I must ask: What is true?…”

« Ils sont terrifiés par la médecine occidentale »

“…Cet accent sur les « mauvais comportements » traduit la perception que l'épidémie est le produit de pratiques inadéquates « chez soi » qui perdurent. (Baggini, 2017;Hyvönen, 2018;Koro-Ljungberg, Carlson & Montana, 2019;Paul & Haddad, 2019;Prozorov, 2019). En effet, la popularisation contemporaine de ces deux concepts traduit une appréhension chez le grand public et chez les décideurs politiques, qui craignent une crise d' « irrationalité » « Ils sont terrifiés par la médecine occidentale » RESET, 10 | 2021 diffuse où des faussetés atteignent le statut de vérité (Leroy et al, 2018).…”

Comparative and international education research in a post‐truth era

“…Some track the roots of post‐truth to the spread of relativism and postmodernism in the 1980s (Foroughi, Gabriel, & Fotaki, ) and to Science and Technology Studies' claims about the socially constructed nature of science and knowledge (Collins, Evans, & Weinel, ). Others defend Science and Technology Studies (Sismondo, ) and postmodernism from the anti‐intellectual violence of the post‐truth rise, conceptualising post‐truth as a kind of the alt‐postmodernity (Kester, , p. 1,331), and viral (Rider & Peters, ) or liquid modernity (Koro‐Ljungberg, Carlson, & Montana, ), underscoring the social, digital and unstable reality of facts and evidence.…”