Post-Truth Politics and the Government of Things

How come that politicians today seem to assert power not despite, but precisely because they triumphantly embrace the lie or enjoy bullshitting? What kind of truth regime is it we live in today? Following Foucault, we may hold that truth regimes present themselves on four levels: on the level of statements and their contestation; on the level of the subject that speaks and thus enacts the truth; on the level of the episteme that define our modes of thinking and of what can be said and seen; and finally on the level of regimes of power that generate certain forms of knowledge and of constituting norms and related modes of government. Taking these four features together, truth regimes may be analyzed in a genealogical perspective with regard to their power effects: what kind of subject do they produce and how do they constrain but also enable certain forms of truth speaking? Yet the paper puts a different focus. Regimes of power, in a way, by themselves rely on truth. While they cannot be reduced to the political sphere, they are political in that they hinge on what is considered and experienced as an adequate description of a problem and a possible solution to it. And it is in this sense, the paper argues, that current post-truth politics speak of a crisis of government: of the end of the liberal order as we knew it, as the possibilities of how we are able to make sense of the world have radically changed.