Political Discourse from Truth to Truthiness

Milwaukee.
The final keynote of AoIR 2009 is by Megan Boler, editor of Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times. She begins by noting the shared sense of aporia at the conference. What do we do as we face the rapidly changing environments of social media - do we feel let down by the Internet, do we daily have to renegotiate the changing visage of the Internet? Megan is particularly interested in exploring this in the context of war, and especially the war on terror - so much especially of the material produced from critical perspectives is dismissed as noise here, so how do we make what we feel is important audible and visible? (To illustrate this, Megan shows a video compiling the repetitive use of certain keywords - September 11, Saddam Hussein, war on terror, terrorism - by US leaders.)

This has created a public crisis of faith in truth-telling - we increasingly demand truthful accounts of world events, but paradoxically also see more and more of the news as a construction guided by specific ideologies. Bush aides have quite openly pointed to the US as a new form of empire, creating its own reality through its actions. This manipulation of news coverage also links nicely to Florida Supreme Court ruling in 2003 that the news is not required to tell the truth.

Megan and her team have engaged in a research project examining the motivations for users to participate in alternative news projects - such as those around the Daily Show and Colbert Report shows, Bush in 30 Seconds, and similar projects. Political bloggers, in particular, turned out to be committed to dialogue and debate across partisan lines, in efforts to come to truth via agonistic debate, deliberative dialogue, and pluralistic engagement - while the Bush in 30 Seconds campaign, which used a Quicktime movie-making contest to generate a TV ad to be shown during the Superbowl, exhibited some very different patterns.

How do productive forces ally conceptualise truth as they aim to bring new forms of knowledge into being? Different notions of truth are possible here, each of which motivate the creation of oppositional media content in a different way: moral, epistemological, and truth allied with force. The latter links to the observation that reiteration is a strategic operation of the media to ensure that a particular 'truth' is positioned through productive force as the most salient aspect in the production of the sensible, while the moral notion exhibits a frustration with being lied to by politicians or being misreported to by media organisations, and the epistemological is interested in highlighting the real facts.

For Deleuze, thinking is conflict and rupture, and from this, transformation becomes possible; similarly, for Ranciere, politics is disagreement, which may interrupt the distribution of the sensible - and the noise, the intolerable which results may be transformed into something which can be heard. This is not simply a matter of misinterpretation or differing interpretation, but of mutually exclusive understandings which cannot be reconciled.

Respondents to the study expressed a criticism of the media not doing their job to uncover the truth; this also overlapped with a view of the responsibility of the media as making sense of the world. Strategies of their own response included humour and parody, fighting misinformation with counterinformation, using media remix to correct the record (as the Daily Show does so often, for example - thus also, importantly, maintaining a form of public memory at a time when there still are no public archives of broadcast news).

Megan also points to the recent 'you lie' moment in Congress as an instance of saying 'I will not be placed in this relational position of subordination', rather than as a simple statement of 'you are not telling the truth'. This points to the fact that in political discourse, the epistemological is less important now - we are turning away from truth to sensibility: practical truths and things that make sense in the day-to-day world of our experience. The problem is not one of not speaking the same language, but of knowing whether the subjects which participate in the interlocution count or not, whether they are speaking or just making noise, whether they see the object or not.

In relation to this, Megan notes that affect is a missing facet in the analysis of political theories, and this ties to the use of Colbertian truthiness and emotional appeal to get a message across - this is not about facts, then, but about perception, not about what is true, but what people want to be true, what they feel to be true (what they feel to be true). The popularity of the concept of truthiness, in fact, reveals desperation about the political process.

So, we are moving towards a new ontology of truth - is it an object, or a force with which social and political orders are formed? How do forms of democracy come into being, and what role do social media, user-generated content, have to play in this? The work of freedom is infinite and never complete - and there is much to be said about the organised strategies and practices which we may now analyse in these new media forms.

Technorati : AoIR 2009, government, lies, media, politics, produsage, social media, truth, truthiness
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