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When Nothing Is True, Everything Is Possible: On Truth and Power by Way of Socialist Realism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Haiyan Lee
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Extract

In this essay, i contend that our current crisis of truth, however distressing, is a replay of an earlier one that saw a far-reaching, devastating destruction of truth. The simultaneous recrudescence of right-wing populism and dawn of the post-truth age recall the way totalitarian movements in the twentieth century exposed the masses to organized lying. Today, the plague of so-called alternative facts and fake news, while incubated and spread by digital technology, can, like totalitarianism's organized lies, be traced back to the erosion of democratic institutions and the loss of faith in democracy's foundational narratives. To understand how our contemporary politics could be going down the dark lane of history again, I turn to the political philosophy of Claude Lefort, Anthony Giddens, and Hannah Arendt, who have written perspicaciously on what happens to truth when the citizenry collectively disinvests from common knowledge and disbelieves in the common good.

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 134 , Issue 5 , October 2019 , pp. 1157 - 1164
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2019

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