The hegemonic world picture: Representation, post-truth, and artificial intelligence

The present article contributes to recent scholarship on “post-truth” politics, by analytically relating the rise of the “digital Far-Right” to the communicative logic of AI-powered social media. It employs a semiotic approach that traces the onslaught of “post-truth” politics to the operational logic of algorithmic social media. These systems expedite information flows, leading to the complexification and ambiguation of representation, which is leveraged in the form of political rhetoric in the service of factional interests and hegemonic ambitions. From this perspective, “post-truth” politics involve the symbolic consolidation of disparate (digital) representations vis-à-vis “total representations” where “a part” comes to represent “the whole.” By lacking propositional specificity, “total representations” exceed on a de facto basis scientific verification standards, which presuppose propositional specificity, and are implicated in the alignment of factional interests by contingently fixing the free-flow of information in the digital public sphere. These findings are examined with reference to current debates on de-democratization and the rise of the ‘digital Far-Right’. It is argued that the ‘digital Far-Right’ employs malleable communication strategies that are context-dependent, which make use of total representations that teeter between foundationalism and relativism. This ambiguity, increases the appeal of Far-Right ideology, by enabling it to traverse and ‘pollinate’ diverse ideational domains. This compels us to reconceptualize democratic agency, by empirically relating it with the operational ecology of social media platforms. As I argue, this highlights the necessity for a “digital democratic strategy” predicated upon the creative leveraging of evocative rhetoric, as an antidote to information complexity, without abandoning the tenets of rationalism and democratic deliberation. As I have argued, the function of rhetoric will be crucial in weaving together ‘sloganesque’ and ‘rationalist’ modes of contestation, as their frontiers will require common discursive referents. This presupposes blurring the distinction between ‘expert’, ‘political’, and ‘poetic’ discourse, where the politician becomes the expert, the expert becomes the politician and both become poets.