Nostalgic Post-Truth: Towards an Anti-Humanist Theory of Communication

While there are notable differences among the mainstream accounts of post-truth politics and broader diagnoses of a post-truth ‘condition’, most of them share one notable feature: a pessimist, sometimes even dystopian, view of today’s world. Contemporary society, it is often alleged, suffers from an inability to separate truth from fiction and is easily misled by populist politicians. Much of the blame is also directed towards social media platforms and digital technologies more broadly conceived for allegedly leading publics astray. In fact, even the term itself rather tellingly signifies a nostalgic attitude of better times (of purified ‘truth’, ‘rationality’ etc.) that have been almost irrevocably lost. Against such a nostalgic attitude, this paper aims to construe post-truth not as a disease but as a symptom of normality. Post-truth, it is argued, testifies to a different, embodied, embedded, and relational model of knowledge, whereby the flows and cognition of information are dependent on communication infrastructures, the tides and ebbs of affect, bodily functions, such as the release of stress or pleasure hormones, aspects of human psychology, inter-human interaction etc. Instead of positing humans as independent and self-sufficient political agents, such an anti-humanist stance reframes the human as a mere malleable node, not the locus but an intersection of information processing. This understanding of how the post-truth environment is experienced at an affective level, allows us to better grasp the way that populist forces mobilize post-truth narratives.