[D66] Post-Truth Politics or Post-Political Journalism?

[A.O.]

http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3043-post-truth-politics-or-post-political-journalism

Post-Truth Politics or Post-Political Journalism?

By Frédéric Lordon / 11 January 2017

First published in Le Monde Diplomatique. Translated by David Broder.


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Post-political journalism

The journalism "combatting" post-truth thus seems radically incapable of 
seeing that it is itself much worse: a post-political journalism, or 
rather the fantasy of it. This is the journalism that definitively 
freezes the fundamental choices, categorically delimits the boundaries 
of things, and ultimately acts as a guard-dog for the existing order. 
The frenzy for fact-checking is itself the belated derivative — albeit 
the most highly representative product — of the post-political 
journalism that has in fact long reigned. In this journalism there is no 
longer anything to discuss except factual truths. The spontaneous 
philosophy of fact-checking is that the world is just a collection of 
facts. It says not only that, like the land, the facts do not lie, but 
that they make up the totality of what there is to say about the world 5.

The problem is that this post-political truth, as opposed to post-truth 
politics, is itself entirely false. Correctly established facts will 
never be the be-all and end-all of politics, but barely its beginning, 
because facts have never said anything by themselves. Nothing! Facts are 
only ordered by way of a labour of mediations, which is not internal to 
these facts themselves. They only make sense when they are grasped from 
the outside by beliefs, ideas, interpretative schemas — in short, when 
there is politics, ideology.

The spasm of disgust that the word "ideology" invariably provokes is the 
most characteristic symptom of post-political journalism. Like "reform" 
and "modern," the term "going beyond ideology" is itself an index of 
cretinism. And it is no surprise that the post-political cretin is an 
admirer of "reality" — systematically opposed to any idea of doing 
things differently. Obviously the two are intimately linked, and they go 
together with fact-checking (at arm’s length). The complete purging of 
ideology finally allows for the appearance of a "reality" that it itself 
imperishable. For there is no longer anything left to be done but 
rationally fact-check the conformity of post-political utterances to the 
"facts" of this reality.

It is worth seeing the stunned, bovine faces of those confronted with 
the idea that the "end of ideologies" and the "rejection of ideologies" 
are, unknowingly, the height of ideology. This helps us get a more 
precise idea of the intellectual decay from which there simultaneously 
emerged "reality" as an argument made to shut down all discussion, 
evidently meaning the negation of any politics that represents a 
possible alternative; the column-writing submerged in the categories of 
"realism" and "pragmatism"; the choice place the media give to their 
fact-checking sections; the certainty of being on top of one’s political 
duties once one has fact-checked everything; the sincere distress over 
the fact that populations are not themselves bending to the truth of the 
correct facts; and perseverance in the project of submitting all 
politics to the realm of fact-checking, making it the shop window of a 
modern press that very tellingly pushes its Décodeurs and its Désintox 
[fact-checkers for Le Monde and Libération respectively] onto front of 
stage.


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