Truth in the Public Sphere 1498530826, 9781498530828

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Truth in the Public Sphere

Truth in the Public Sphere Edited by Jason Hannan

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2016 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is Available ISBN 978-1-4985-3082-8 (cloth : alkaline paper) ISBN 978-1-4985-3083-5 (electronic) TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction: Truth as First Casualty in American Politics Jason Hannan

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I: Discourse and Communication 1 Toward an Activist Theory of Language David I. Backer 2 Habermas’s Account of Truth in Political Communication Lewis A. Friedland and Thomas B. Hove

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II: Ethics and Justice 3 One Word Does Not a Whole Story Tell: Contested Truth on a Highway Historical Marker Spoma Jovanovic, Shelley Sizemore, Yacine Kout, Jeanette Musselwhite, Jenny Southard, and Kelly M. O’Donnell 4 The Tragic Action and Revolutionary Intent of Black Lives: The Historical Genealogies and Corporeal Dynamics of Cornel West’s Prophetic Pragmatism in Post-Racial America Paul R. D. Lawrie 5 Jacques Rancière, Mass Education, and the Linguistic Adventure around Truth Charles Bingham

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III: Journalism and Politics 6 #NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement: On Truth and Lies in an Affective Sense Christopher J. Gilbert 7 Motivated to Ignore the Facts: The Inability of Fact-Checking to Promote Truth in the Public Sphere Jeffrey W. Jarman 8 Telling the Truth about War in Six Words Lisa Silvestri IV: Visual Media, Art, and Aesthetics 9 A Special Kind of Authenticity: The Portrayal of Civilian Deaths and Injuries in Vernacular Soldier Photography Makeda Best 10 No Doubt: The Politics of Photography in Antonioni’s Blow-Up Chris Balaschak 11 Light and the Truth in Painting: Thinking Blumenberg’s Absolute Metaphor of Light through Cézanne Francis Halsall

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Index

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About the Contributors

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Acknowledgments

As far as academic projects go, putting this volume together has by far been one of the most seamless and enjoyable for me. I am grateful to Michael Dorland, Chris Dornan, and Marc Furstenau, with whom I first explored my interest in the philosophical problem of truth. Vincent Colapietro, Michael Lynch, Amit Pinchevski, Chris Russill, and Linda Steiner very kindly shared their encouraging thoughts and questions on the initial proposal for this book. I wish to thank Robert Byrnes, Matthew Flisfeder, Alicia Harlow, Jason Harlow, Jaqueline McLeod Rogers, and Cimbria Peterson for offering their feedback on the introduction. I am fortunate to have worked with Nicolette Amstutz, Jimmy Hamill, and Tracy Galloway at Lexington, who made the whole publication process simple, straightforward, and remarkably stressfree. Finally, I wish to thank the contributors, who not only responded to the initial call for papers with great interest, but who also wrote truly excellent chapters, thereby making this volume a genuine success. It has been a sincere pleasure working with them.

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Introduction Truth as First Casualty in American Politics Jason Hannan

The election of George W. Bush in 2000 to the most powerful political office on earth generated national and even international shock and bafflement. There were two reasons for this. One was because Mr. Bush was not, by any democratic measure, the legitimate victor in the 2000 presidential election. He won despite losing the popular vote, a modern political scandal that has since been forever seared into public memory. A second reason had to do with the state of the man’s mind: it was virtually impossible for Bush, when not relying upon a teleprompter, to utter more than two sentences without brutalizing the English language. Bush was the first president to possess the nuclear codes who could not pronounce the word nuclear, let alone participate in political discourse in coherent English. Although he was never officially diagnosed with a learning disorder, several language experts have suggested that Bush very likely suffers from dyslexia. 1 The consequences of dyslexia for public speaking can be severe, ranging from grammatical infelicities and embarrassing malapropisms to incoherent answers to simple questions. All of these rhetorical offences eventually became hallmarks of the Bush legacy. But dyslexia is first and foremost a reading disorder. In extreme cases, it means an inability to concentrate on, and therefore to understand, written texts. If Bush had a problem with reading comprehension, as seems to be the case, then how could he have evaluated the lengthy and complex documents placed before him for critical decisions, documents that in some cases involved matters of life and death? During his time as governor of Texas, for example, Bush claimed to have personally evaluated every single death penalty case in the state. He became a nightmare for civil liberties and human rights organizations, presiding over xi

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no less than 152 executions. 2 But herein, as one prominent commentator astutely pointed out, lay a problem: If Bush could not read, then can we really take him at his word when he claimed to have personally scrutinized each case? 3 As Bush put it, “I take every death penalty case seriously and review each case carefully. . . . Each case is major because each case is life or death.” 4 But if Bush could not read, then did the actual substance of the cases make a difference to his judgment? Put simply, did the truth matter to him? The question of Bush’s relationship to the truth became infinitely more urgent in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In 1998, the Project for the New American Century, a neoconservative think-tank founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan, sent a letter to President Bill Clinton calling for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Among the signatories to the letter were Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Elliott Abrams, all of whom would later serve in the Bush administration. 5 Just ten days after his inauguration, President Bush held his first National Security Council meeting, in which the top item on the agenda was the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. According to Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, “It was all about finding a way to [remove Saddam]. The president saying, ‘Go find me a way to do this.’” 6 The 9/11 attacks gave President Bush what he was looking for. Just hours after the attacks, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and other senior members of the administration began strategizing ways to tie 9/11 to Saddam. 7 At first, they claimed that Iraq harbored terrorists. 8 They claimed that one of the 9/11 hijackers had met with an Iraqi spy at the Iraqi embassy in Prague. 9 They claimed that Iraqi officials had met with Osama bin Laden in Sudan. 10 The CIA sent Joe Wilson, a former American diplomat, to Niger to investigate claims that Iraq had purchased yellowcake, a concentrated form of uranium that can be used for either nuclear reactors or nuclear weapons. 11 In numerous public statements about Iraq, President Bush repeatedly mentioned 9/11. Although he did not explicitly blame Saddam for orchestrating the attacks, the repeated mention of 9/11 and Saddam, very often in the same breath, suggested a solid link between them. This last rhetorical strategy was apparently so effective that nearly 70 percent of the American public came to believe that Saddam was behind 9/11. 12 One of the key pieces of evidence used to justify the invasion came in the form of a special New York Times investigative report by Michael Gordon and the now-disgraced Judith Miller, who cited anonymous sources from within the Bush administration claiming that Saddam had sought to acquire aluminum tubes. According to these anonymous officials, the active search for aluminum tubes, which are required to enrich uranium, amounted to a “smoking gun”—incontrovertible evidence of Iraq’s intentions to develop a nuclear weapon. 13 Seizing upon the New York Times report, Bush’s national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, appeared on CNN, saying, “[W]e don’t

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want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” 14 That same day, Cheney appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press, claiming “with absolute certainty” that Saddam was seeking to build a nuclear weapon. 15 Only days later, President Bush took this claim to the United Nations General Assembly to make his case that the international community had a duty to act against Saddam. 16 The circularity of the reasoning was not lost upon critical observers: Bush administration officials citing a New York Times investigative report that cited anonymous Bush administration officials. A second key piece of evidence came in the form of the infamous dossier released by British prime minister Tony Blair’s government, which claimed that Iraq had developed the capability to launch biological and chemical weapons within forty-five minutes. 17 Despite Defense Intelligence Agency assessments to the contrary, President Bush began stating publicly that Iraq possessed biological and chemical weapons, and a willingness to use them. In a notorious theatrical display, Secretary of State Colin Powell appeared before the United Nations Security Council waving a simulated vial of anthrax, saying, “Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.” 18 None of these “facts” or “conclusions” could be corroborated by Hans Blix, head of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, or by Mohammed Elbaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Without a shred of reliable evidence, the Bush administration nonetheless pressed its case for Saddam’s culpability, which now included a barrage of claims so urgent and dire they seemed almost designed to leave the public too stunned and speechless to respond: that Saddam was linked to Al-Qaeda, that Saddam had stockpiled biological and chemical weapons, that Saddam had “reconstituted nuclear weapons,” that Saddam was deceiving UN weapons inspectors, and that Saddam posed a serious and immanent threat, not just to his neighbors in the region, but also to the United States. That these claims were supported neither by evidence nor even by logic did not seem to matter. 19 In March of 2003, the United States fulfilled its publicly stated intention of invading Iraq. As we now know, the United States never found its smoking gun. Despite years of carefully combing through every facility in Iraq, no evidence of biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons ever surfaced. The invasion, as critics observed before the war and as the world learned after, was predicated upon a spectacular falsehood. Yet, even in the face of this disturbing realization, senior members of the Bush administration insisted that invading Iraq was “the right thing to do,” regardless of whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Saddam, the argument went, was a tyrant who had massacred and tortured his own people. He therefore had to go. 20 These crimes, it goes without saying, were very real. Saddam had gassed the Kurds and tortured countless Iraqis in a medieval house of horrors through the most brutal tor-

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ture methods imaginable. He was every bit the monster these pundits made him out to be. But what they left out was that Saddam was an American ally during the worst of his atrocities. During the 1980s, when Iraq was at war with Iran, Saddam received generous financial and military support from the United States. He even received a personal visit from Donald Rumsfeld himself, who was then serving as special envoy to Iraq under President Reagan. 21 This lapse in memory would have been bad enough before the invasion. That it should have happened after made it all the more egregious: it amounted to revising the rationale for a massively expensive and deadly war after the fact. More egregious still were the huge numbers of Americans who agreed with this post facto revision for the case for invading Iraq. According to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll conducted in February of 2004, nearly half of those polled believed the war was justified even if no weapons were found. 22 Although popular opinion shifted dramatically as the war dragged on and as American casualties in Iraq rose to numbers too high for the public to ignore any longer, early support for the invasion revealed something deeply disturbing about a large segment of the American public: a willingness to support large-scale violence overseas regardless of the evidence. President Bush and his cabinet were thus not unique in their dysfunctional relationship with the truth. For pro-war media pundits and huge numbers of Americans, the truth seemed not to matter very much at all. To critics of the Iraq war, and to eight years of brazen economic mismanagement, resulting first in the stock market crash of 2007 and then a global recession from the effects of which we have yet to recover, George W. Bush represented the absolute nadir of American politics. Surely, it was thought, it could not get any worse than Bush. Surely, it was thought, no politician could be more clueless, more gaffe-prone, more callous with respect to fact and logic than Bush. But the emergence of Sarah Palin onto the American political scene effectively shattered that belief completely. To the surprise of Bush’s critics and even his sympathizers, Palin signaled a new low for American politics. Upon being named John McCain’s vice presidential running mate in 2008, Palin delivered a scripted speech at the Republican National Convention, where she was enthusiastically welcomed as the new political superstar of the Republican Party. Curiously, she then all but disappeared from the public eye. It was not until after months of being carefully sheltered from the media by cynical political strategists that Palin finally agreed to give a series of interviews with major American news channels. In doing so, she revealed a shocking naiveté about government, law, economics, international relations, history, and even geography. Those interviews have since become a kind of greatest hits of embarrassing gaffes, the stuff that ravenous late night comedians’ dreams are made of. Palin was mercilessly and ceaselessly mocked on television and social media for making the kind

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of comments one might have expected from a child, not a vice presidential running mate. The public humiliation to which Palin was subjected so soon after being thrown into the public spotlight undoubtedly took a toll on her psyche. After she and McCain lost the election, Palin went on the warpath, attacking anyone and everyone she perceived as an enemy: Barack Obama, liberals, the media, even the Republican establishment. She joined the Tea Party movement, speaking at their rallies and endorsing their political candidates, in many cases bringing them to victory. 23 She fought aggressively against the Affordable Care Act, spreading raw fear about “death panels” that would decide whether elderly patients lived or died. 24 She joined Fox News as a regular political analyst, offering her characteristically resentful and inarticulate thoughts on current affairs. She published a string of books, all clearly ghostwritten, showcasing her defiant patriotism and her red-blooded, starspangled, meat-eating, Jesus-loving, gun-toting, all-American folksy ethos. 25 Disappointing those who would rather have watched her fade into oblivion after the 2008 election, Palin demonstrated a remarkable staying power. She proved to be a political force in her own right, one the Republican establishment could not ignore, no matter how much she made them cringe with embarrassment. They realized all too well the effect of “the Palin bump” on Republican politics. They closely followed her political endorsements. They listened each time she teased them with the prospect of running for president. They took care not to say anything or do anything to antagonize her. They might, after all, one day need to rely on her. Most recently, Palin has waged war on climate scientists, presenting herself as one of the few courageous voices daring to question the totalitarianism of climate science. She has charged the scientific community with brainwashing children with false information. She has claimed that climate scientists are part of a vast, global conspiracy—the exact point of which she has never bothered to make clear. 26 But respect for fact and logic has never been of much interest to Sarah Palin. Her popular appeal lies, not in her truthfulness, but rather in her subversive persona. Palin has come to see herself as a people’s hero. The heroic narrative has been a recurring theme of her public speeches. She styles herself an underdog, fighting on behalf of everyday, folksy Americans against the tyranny of one or another cosmic evil. But fighting against political rivals is one thing. Fighting against the scientific community is quite another. The sheer gall of a non-scientist, especially one as scientifically illiterate as Sarah Palin, challenging the de facto consensus of the scientific community has only provided late night comedy with more fodder for merciless ridicule. 27 Palin’s paranoid habit of lashing out at everyone she dislikes has only led to further public humiliation. It has been a long, ongoing cycle ever since she made the fateful choice to enter national politics in 2008.

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But nothing, not even the rise of Bush or Palin, could have prepared the world for Donald Trump. If Bush and Palin degraded the quality of American political discourse, Donald Trump has managed to drag it down to truly subterranean levels. Trump’s presidential campaign has defied the expectations of even the shrewdest political commentators, leaving them in crippling self-doubt about their ability to comment with authority on American politics. There has never been a presidential candidate quite like Donald Trump, a man whose hair has been read as a metaphor for his politics: bizarre, confusing, laughable, disingenuous, hideous. 28 His sentence structure has been described as that of an eight-year-old. 29 His emotional maturity, that of a five-year-old. 30 His rhetoric, that of a fascist. 31 His ego, that of a megalomaniac. 32 Like Palin, a long history of repeated failure does not seem to obstruct his self-image. His multiple bankruptcies and failed marriages seem to be only so many minor and irrelevant details in the grandiose fantasy that he inhabits. If Palin styles herself an underdog, Trump styles himself the quintessential American success story. Success is the sine qua non of Trump’s self-image. In that self-image, Trump does success like the rest of us breathe air. He succeeds at everything naturally and effortlessly. Trump was born for success. Trump is success. No message could be more evident from his longwinded speeches on the campaign trail. In fact, no other message is evident. To his credit, Trump has been genuinely successful in at least one respect. He has carved out—some might say slashed and burned—his own space within the American public sphere. He operates by his own rules. Trump does not compete in the game of rational argument. Instead, he has displaced it with a new game, that of braggadocio, machismo, and bravado. To argue against Trump with fact and logic is to play the wrong game. To present Trump with rational arguments, no matter how accurate, no matter how forceful, is to leave him perfectly unscathed. Even quoting Trump’s own seemingly self-discrediting words and citing his own seemingly scandalous deeds back at him do nothing to disarm him. For every rational criticism, Trump responds with a bombastic display of pride, arrogance, contempt, and dismissal. To fight Donald Trump on his own terrain is to lose by default. It is Trump’s game; no one else’s. Trump trades in the currency of personal insults. It is impossible to keep up with the many people, places, and things he has verbally attacked. 33 The ease with which he makes preposterous statements, only then to deny ever having made them, makes heads spin. He has a unique ability to outdo his own audacity. There is no winning an argument against a man who will defend the size of his penis in public debate. 34 Trump has displayed more contempt for truth and civility than any politician in American history. 35 With the submissive and uncritical assistance of the America media, which have competed with each other to provide Trump with front-page coverage rather than hold him accountable for his lies and

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falsehoods, Trump has succeeded in making himself the focus of the 2016 election. Even his Republican rivals, hoping to campaign as the alternative to Barack Obama, have been forced to campaign in the 2016 Republican primaries as the alternative to Donald Trump. They seem more concerned about Trump than Obama, the latter long thought by the Tea Party to be the single greatest evil since the Führer himself. Yet, for all his bombast and pretension, Trump is not a one-man show. His success in the 2016 Republican presidential primary would not have been possible but for the millions of voters who have uncritically swallowed his bait. Trump’s supporters have shown themselves to be just as impervious to fact and logic as Trump himself. 36 They pay less attention to the propositional content of his words than to the non-rational sentiments behind them. Trump communicates through pure pathos. Words are but superficial dressing for the passions he conveys. He speaks to the primitive, atavistic impulses of his supporters, impulses that have been buried for decades just beneath the surface of their consciousness, and which have been aggravated by years of economic misery and angry, bloviating right-wing talk radio. Trump has perfected an uncanny ability to bring out the worst in his supporters. His campaign events are horrifying rituals of mindless chanting and rage-filled, testosterone-drenched chest beating. A Donald Trump rally is essentially a white power rally, a gathering of belligerent know-nothings overflowing with irrational resentment against feminists, blacks, Latinos, Arabs, Muslims, Jews, gays, lesbians, the transgendered, and the disabled. Those who have dared to protest his hateful rhetoric directly have placed their physical safety in danger. Violence has become a recurring element of Trump’s rallies. 37 Trump himself has actively encouraged it, leaving many wondering why he has not yet been arrested for inciting violence. 38 It is not for nothing that so many concerned observers have drawn a parallel between Trump’s election campaign and the Third Reich. 39 With the rise of Donald Trump, we have entered the twilight zone of American politics, a brave new world in which the norms of politics, journalism, and public discourse seem to have broken down. Many cultural observers have sought to bring attention to what they see as the truth deficit in the American public sphere. Nowhere is this more evident than in the world of late night comedy. Former Daily Show host Jon Stewart built a formidable legacy using his wildly popular fake news show to fight what he called the war on what he called “bullshit.” 40 Through a combination of biting commentary and “live” on-the-scene reporting by an army of fake journalists, Stewart arguably worked harder than anyone else to hold politicians accountable for their mendacity and hypocrisy, and journalists and news organizations for their bias, superficiality, and sheer silliness. Stewart’s protégé, Stephen Colbert, built his own legacy with The Colbert Report, through which he satirized the prevalence of “truthiness” in political

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discourse and the right-wing commentariat. John Oliver, another veteran of The Daily Show, now host of HBO’s Last Week Tonight, quickly secured a reputation of his own for eviscerating public figures, corporations, and whole industries for their deceit, corruption, and reckless conduct. Real Time host Bill Maher has long featured a segment on his show called “Dispatches from the Bubble,” in which he and a group of panelists analyze the dissembling of politicians who seem genuinely clueless about their own dissembling. Other commentators have gone further and pronounced a death sentence upon truth in America. We are now said to live in a “post-truth era,” in which deception has become a way of life, typified by the use of such cynical euphemisms as “poetic truth,” “parallel truth,” “imaginative truth,” “strategic misrepresentation,” “selective disclosure,” and “counterfactual statements.” 41 We are said to live in the age of “post-truth politics,” in which deceit has become a powerful and lucrative industry for professional liars working on behalf of politicians and mega-corporations. 42 The presidency of George W. Bush has been described as a “post-truth presidency.” 43 We are now even said to have entered the age of “post-truth journalism,” in which reporters reproduce what politicians say without critical comment, thereby allowing falsehoods to proliferate in public discussion. 44 Although traditional journalism has long played some role in evaluating the public statements of politics, the era of new media has given rise to a new world of online factcheckers, some of the most prominent names in this industry being FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and Snopes. Not surprisingly, the pretension of factcheckers to objectivity and conclusiveness has led some to wonder whether the fact-checkers are themselves being fact-checked. 45 There is, of course, no conceivable end to the self-implicating business of fact-checking and metafact-checking. We thus appear to have two opposing orientations in American political discourse today: on the one hand, a defiant disregard for facts; on the other, an obsession with facts. If, as Clausewitz said, war is the continuation of politics by other means, perhaps the new era of American politics can be described as the continuation of war by other means—a war in which, like all wars, truth is the first casualty. THE DEATH OF TRUTH? While late night comedians and political commentators might lament the death of truth in the American public sphere, proponents of a certain fashionable, if by now clichéd, line of thinking within the humanities and even some of the social sciences would rather open a bottle of champagne and gleefully celebrate the death of truth as a long overdue historical milestone. Truth and objectivity, on this line of thinking, are the kind of embarrassing ideals that have no place in a mature intellectual culture. They are seen as the philosoph-

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ical equivalents of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Truth might be a meaningful ideal for those who still adhere to the antiquated standards of the Enlightenment. But for those who have taken the lessons of twentieth century philosophy to heart, truth is a term of unenlightenment and even mystification. One of the most vocal and forceful spokespersons for this line of thinking was the late Richard Rorty. Beginning his academic career as a student of analytic philosophy and a passionate believer in truth and objectivity, Rorty’s faith in philosophy as a secular foundation unraveled in the 1960s. On realizing that analytic philosophy was not all that it was cracked up to be, Rorty fell into a long spell of depression, finding himself tragically unable to write. After a period of immersing himself in the writings of the classical American pragmatists, he reemerged as a harsh and relentless critic of his former fighting faith. 46 He spent the rest of his life working to dismantle the entire edifice of Western philosophy, claiming it was nothing more than a hollow and pretentious castle made of sand—destined, as all such castles are, to fall into the sea. He took aim at the revered philosophical figures on whose writings and grand ideas he had cut his teeth. He tore apart the most revered schools of modern Western thought. But he reserved his harshest criticisms for the foundationalist concepts on which those schools were based. Chief among them was the concept of truth. In his key writings from this later period, Rorty argues that the veneration of truth is no different than the veneration of God. 47 To venerate either is to be subservient to a fiction that can be manipulated for political purposes. On this view, once God was understood to be a myth, we liberated ourselves from feeling answerable to God. Similarly, because truth is a myth, we ought to liberate ourselves from feeling answerable to the truth. We are answerable only to each other: the community of fallible and imperfect human beings. Every argument, every claim, whether scientific, historical, ethical, or political, can only be addressed to one or another context-bound audience. To aim any higher, toward a universal authority independent of all human audiences, such as God or truth, is to become mired in specious metaphysics. At that point, our arguments inevitably go downhill. Rorty therefore elevates the value of social solidarity over that of objectivity. 48 So long as we take care to protect the freedom of the individual to say what she thinks, our disagreements will have a way of working themselves out. 49 For Rorty’s brand of anti-philosophy, the last enemy is not falsehood, but coercion—as though the two could somehow be cleanly separated. This would be a very powerful argument, so long as we accept the premise that truth is the kind of metaphysical illusion that keeps us shackled to ignorance and superstition. But how compelling is that premise? Rorty thinks it’s the logical conclusion to twenty-five hundred years of Western philosophy, which he takes to be a long, painful, and catastrophic failure. Like

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Nietzsche, Foucault, and Derrida, with whom he is so often compared, Rorty reads the Western tradition as the misguided search for foundations. He traces this misguided search back to Plato, whose allegory of the cave provided the single most enduring historical self-image for the role of the philosopher. Unlike laypersons, who wander in darkness and take what few flickering images they see to be the whole of reality, Plato presents the philosopher as having the power to leave the cave and walk in the brilliant light of truth and knowledge, grasping reality without distortions. The philosopher sees what laypersons cannot see, including the latter’s misapprehensions. Truth for Plato resides in a lofty and heavenly realm of absolute perfection, the realm of the forms, far above the messy world of human imperfection, inadequacy, error, and delusion. Through the allegory of the cave, Plato furnishes the philosopher with the task of attaining the truth. As Rorty sees it, it has been the philosopher’s task ever since. Like Alfred North Whitehead Rorty reads the history of Western philosophy as a long series of footnotes to Plato. 50 On this reading, the Western tradition is a conversation begun by Plato on terms more or less set by Plato. That conversation has certainly moved in different directions through the philosophical interventions of Descartes, Kant, and Hegel. The big answers have certainly varied—dramatically. But the driving questions are still those posed by Plato twenty-five hundred years ago. The one thread that runs consistently through that long and winding conversation is the search for truth, a search most powerfully symbolized by the allegory of the cave. This thread runs well into the modern era. As Rorty reads them, each of the three major philosophical traditions of the modern era—rationalism, empiricism, and idealism—takes the discovery of truth to be its ultimate goal. The starting assumptions and methods might be different, but the aim is the same. These traditions are nothing if not systematic programs for the attainment of truth. That truth is something to be attained at all is precisely the problem, as Rorty sees it. We seem unable to speak about truth except through the metaphors through which we speak about God. We treat truth as something to be found, grasped, held, discovered, revealed. In keeping with the allegory of the cave, we speak about truth in physical terms, as having a location where the truth can be found. The physical metaphors for thinking about truth that animate philosophical inquiry have permeated everyday language. “The truth is out there,” says the tagline to the opening credits of The X-Files. No, it is not, Rorty would respond. As he puts it, “The truth cannot be out there— cannot exist independently of the human mind—because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there.” 51 We have been tricked by our own metaphors into searching for something that could never be found in the first place. To say that Rorty regards truth as a quirk of human language would be something of an understatement. He follows Donald Davidson 52 in conclud-

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ing that, despite our confident truth talk, truth is actually indefinable. This conclusion is not unreasonable in light of the many failed attempts to make sense of the very idea of truth. The oldest of these attempts is Aristotle’s correspondence theory. In his Metaphysics, Aristotle offers the following technical and inelegant view of truth: “To say that that which is, is not, or that which is not is, is a falsehood; and to say that that which is, is, and that which is not, is not, is true.” 53 Aristotle here captures the core idea behind the correspondence theory: that true statements bear some sort of relationship with reality. While simple and commonsensical at first, a closer examination reveals the difficulty of pinning this idea down with any precision. What, for example, is the nature of the relationship or correspondence with reality? What corresponds with what? Is it a sentence, claim, or proposition? An idea, image, or representation? A belief, attitude, or state of mind? And how are we to make sense of the very idea of reality? The correspondence theory appears to smuggle in cryptic concepts (correspondence and reality) that themselves require theorizing. In contrast to the correspondence theory, the German and British idealists adopted a coherence theory of truth. 54 According to the coherence theory, truth is a feature of the internal coherence of a given web of beliefs. So long as that web allows us to make sense of the world, its degree of internal coherence can be understood as a measure of its truth. The significance of coherentism can be illustrated with an example from the natural sciences. If, for example, m-theory enables us to make better sense of gravitational waves, and to guide physical experiments and make predictions with meaningful and consistent results, then to the extent that m-theory is internally coherent, to that extent it is true. The coherence theory thus avoids the metaphysical problem of determining the nature of the correspondence between claims/representations/beliefs and reality. While superficially appealing, the coherence theory nonetheless violates a common understanding about truth. If truth is but mere coherence, then all coherent systems are true. But what about two coherent systems that lead to contradictory conclusions? Are evolution and Creationism both true simply on account of their internal coherence? This conclusion strikes us as preposterous. We take the truth to be timeless and universal, not context-bound and relative. The coherence theory proves to be unsatisfying by leading to relativist conclusions. The classical American pragmatists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries proposed two notable alternatives to the correspondence and coherence theories. Charles Peirce, the founder of the pragmatist movement, proposed thinking of truth as the end of inquiry—the outcome of a long and unfettered process of systematic investigation, leading to a collective convergence of judgment. 55 This view has the merit of avoiding the pitfalls of the correspondence and coherence theories by tying truth to the social practice of inquiry. Peirce’s theory taps into our implicit conception of truth as an ideal

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outcome. Yet, it leaves open a nagging question: how do we know when we have reached the end of inquiry? By what standard or criterion? We may conclude that inquiry into the assassination of John F. Kennedy has reached an end, only to discover new evidence that undermines that conclusion. How then do we know which conclusion to trust as final and incontrovertible? Truth as the end of inquiry remains far too vague and abstract to be of much practical use. Peirce’s fellow pragmatist and intellectual rival William James took the contrasting view that truth should be understood as the usefulness of an idea. On this view, truth is measured by how much an idea can deliver. This approach enables us to differentiate between internally coherent theories by determining which theory produces more results. The one that gives us greater results is the truer theory. The gist of this view is expressed in James’s famous assertion that “‘the true’ is only the expedient in our way of thinking.” 56 Although it is not entirely clear what James meant by this hazy assertion, the most common interpretation is that truth is simply “what works.” Again, this way of thinking about truth has its superficial appeal, since it treats truth in practical and tangible terms. But it, too, suffers from a serious weakness. Bertrand Russell pointed out that the Jamesian view reduces truth to the contingent and self-serving, and fails to specify criteria for “what works.” 57 Homeopathy and faith healing, for example, “work” for many people. Some will even entrust their children’s lives to these treatments. Does that mean that the central beliefs behind homeopathy and faith healing are true? Because of the difficulty of defining truth, a number of contemporary philosophers, including Willard Van Orman Quine, Paul Horwich, and Hartry Field, have endorsed a minimalist and deflationary view of truth, arguing that the truth predicate merely serves a linguistic role: that of expressing endorsement for assertions. 58 According to this line of thinking, to say, “It is true that the King of France is bald,” is simply to endorse the assertion, “The King of France is bald.” Similarly, to say, “Everything in the Bible is true,” is shorthand for endorsing the many claims of the Bible without having to endorse each of them individually. While minimalists and deflationists affirm that truth plays an important role in linguistic communication, they nonetheless deny that truth denotes a special kind of property. They thus severely downgrade the metaphysical status of truth. But Rorty would go one step further than his minimalist and deflationist colleagues and jettison truth talk altogether. If we can’t say what truth is, then why bother holding on to it? The concept of truth, Rorty feels, has too much unsavory baggage. Given its history of leading us down misguided, even disastrous, patterns of thinking, and of being manipulated for political purposes, we are surely better off without it. If the concept of truth does no more than serve a linguistic function, then we can get by all the same with

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the trivial labor of adding a few extra words here and there when necessary. But most importantly, Rorty sees justification—the audience-directed practice of providing reasons for what we say and do—as the highest intellectual task we can ever hope to fulfill. Since truth is an illusory goal, discarding it makes no material difference to our conversations. Rorty puts the point as follows: The need to justify our beliefs to ourselves and our fellow agents subjects us to norms, and obedience to these norms produces a behavioural pattern that we must detect in others before confidently attributing beliefs to them. But there seems to be no occasion to look for obedience to an additional norm—the commandment to seek the truth. For . . . obedience to that commandment will produce no behaviour not produced by the need to offer justification. 59

This is an empirical claim about human communication. As such, it is, in principle, empirically verifiable. If what Rorty says is accurate, then we should be able to conduct a meaningful conversation in which truth has been felicitously purged from our linguistic practice. And we should expect that conversation to proceed without any awkward or debilitating difficulty. Could such a conversation even get off the ground? In a detailed analysis of the role of assertions in ordinary linguistic practice, Huw Price has made a powerful case that truth is an implicit norm to which language users are inescapably bound. 60 Without a practical commitment to truth, the bulk of human communication as we know it would cease to be meaningful. Price sets up a clever thought experiment involving a speech community whose members do not observe the norm of truth and for whom the use of assertions is limited to the expression of personal beliefs, desires, and preferences. Lacking the norm of truth, they can at best take each other to task for speaking insincerely or inconsistently, but never for speaking incorrectly. The clearest difference between this hypothetical speech community and actual speech communities is that members of the former community would not be able to disagree with each other. The expression of competing preferences would not provide motivational grounds for disagreement, since disagreement presupposes the possibility of being incorrect. To dissolve the category of truth is, perforce, to dissolve the category of falsehood also. Without the conceptual apparatus to challenge each other, to hold each other accountable for what we say and do, we could not have a speech community at all. Contrary to what Rorty claims, discarding the concept of truth would bring about profound behavioral consequences. It would fundamentally alter the nature of human communication as we know it. As Price puts the point, “Without truth, the wheels of argument do not engage; disagreements slide past one another.” 61 Disagreement about truth and falsehood, in other words, is essential to being a creature of speech. In throwing out the concept of truth, Rorty throws out speech altogether.

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But this isn’t even the most serious objection to Rorty’s epistemological doctrines. James Conant has leveled a far more serious charge, one concerning the political implications of abandoning a commitment to truth. 62 In the penultimate chapter to Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty presents George Orwell as a literary ally in his project of replacing the ideal of objectivity with that of social solidarity. Rorty reads 1984 as a lesson in the absolute sanctity of freedom and the irrelevance of truth and objectivity. When Winston Smith is imprisoned in the Ministry of Love and coerced with the threat of torture to believe that two plus two is five, he surrenders his individuality and submits to the Party and Big Brother. Like every dutiful member of the Party, Winston now believes that two plus two equals five. Like every dutiful member of the Party, Winston now loves Big Brother. What, then, is the moral of the story? According to Rorty, it is that when you lose the freedom to hold your own beliefs, you lose the basis for a sense of self. You are deprived of your humanity and personhood: The only point in making Winston believe that two and two equals five is to break him. Getting somebody to deny a belief for no reason is a first step toward making her incapable of having a self because she becomes incapable of weaving a coherent web of belief and desire. It makes her irrational, in a quite precise sense: She is unable to give a reason for her belief that fits together with her other beliefs. She becomes irrational not in the sense that she has lost contact with reality but in the sense that she can no longer rationalize—no longer justify herself to herself. 63

According to Rorty, it does not matter whether two and two actually equals four. Winston could have believed that two and two equals three or three hundred and it would have made no difference to the story. He would have lost his humanity all the same. Winston should have been free to believe whatever he thought it was right to believe. Truth is of no consequence at the end of the day, even in a totalitarian society like that of 1984. But as Conant points out, this reading of Orwell not only contradicts numerous passages within 1984 about the value of truth and objectivity; they contradict Orwell’s own commentary. Writing in 1941, after he had personally witnessed totalitarian thought control during his time as a solider in the Spanish Civil War, Orwell says: Totalitarianism has abolished freedom of thought to an extent unheard of in any previous age. And it is important to realize that its control of thought is not only negative, but positive. It not only forbids you to express—even to think— certain thoughts, but it dictates what you shall think, it creates an ideology for you, it tries to govern your emotional life as well as setting up a code of conduct. And as far as possible it isolates you from the outside world, it shuts you up in an artificial universe in which you have no standards of comparison. 64

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The aim of totalitarianism is not simply to deprive you of freedom; it is to imprison you within a false universe in which the only standards for thought and judgment are those supplied by the Party. Totalitarianism destroys your ability to apprehend anything independent of what the Party allows. The success of totalitarianism rests upon a systematic brainwashing of the people. It thrives on falsehood and delusion. When the Party sets out to eliminate doublethink, it destroys the capacity for critical thinking and the commitment to truth and objectivity. You believe what the Party tells you to believe. Truth is what the Party says it is. For Orwell, the most terrifying aspect of totalitarianism is that your beliefs about events in the world are formed in spite of those events—purely out of solidarity with the Party. And this, as Conant points out, is the real danger in Rorty’s project of replacing objectivity with solidarity: it leaves Winston utterly powerless to critique the “artificial universe” within which he is imprisoned. Without the very ideas of truth and objectivity, Winston has nowhere to turn but to the concrete walls of Party doctrine. He might protest that his will has been thwarted. He might protest that his body has suffered. But he has no recourse to categories with which to retain his independence of mind and to criticize as categorically false the manufactured beliefs of the Party. In a remarkable admission, Rorty concedes as much to Conant: “The difference between myself and Conant is that he thinks that someone like Winston, trapped in such a society, can turn to the light of the facts. I think that there is nowhere for Winston to turn.” 65 Totalitarianism would love nothing more than for the world to become Rortyan. If anything, it would strengthen its power. As Conant rightly observes, Rorty’s views on truth are best represented not by Orwell, but rather by O’Brien, Winston’s tormenter. 66 For the Party to have any power at all, and to maintain its grip over the people, it must destroy the very idea of objective reality. The greatest threat to totalitarianism is not an independence of the will, but rather an independence of the mind: the ability to question totalitarian dogma by standards of truth and objectivity. It turns out that, contrary to Rorty’s best efforts to persuade us otherwise, truth and freedom are linked after all. Which brings us back to the Iraq war and the thesis of the post-truth era of American politics. If we take the observations of late night comedians and certain political commentators to heart, then it seems we ought to be deeply concerned about the state of American political culture, a culture in which truth is increasingly disregarded by politicians, journalists, and citizens alike. What are the implications of Rorty’s views on truth for such a culture? How would he have us respond to someone like Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, or George W. Bush? To the end of his life, Rorty regarded truth as a rhetorical bludgeon. His greatest goal was to remove that bludgeon from our hands, thereby forcing us to embrace supposedly non-authoritarian modes of conversation as the ideal medium of democratic politics. But if the appeal to

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truth is authoritarian, then would Rorty suggest that we remain silent about Trump’s pathological lying? Or that we remain silent about the reality of climate change in the face of denialists like Sarah Palin? Or that we refrain from criticizing the false and deceptive rationale for invading Iraq? If we follow Rorty’s negative project to the letter, then the most we could object to would be Trump’s incivility, bigotry, and blasé attitude about violence, the social divisiveness of Palin’s rhetoric, and Bush’s unilateralism and hawkishness, but not the total and utter disregard for fact and logic that enabled them to pursue their respective political agendas. Purging our political discourse of the categories of truth and objectivity would only encourage more disastrous foreign invasions based on fabricated pretenses, fuel more absurd conspiracy theories about healthcare and climate scientists, and further empower the dark and toxic nativist culture that gave rise to Donald Trump—a culture so teeming with resentment, paranoia, and psychopathy that many now fear it risks boiling over into large-scale social chaos. In light of the current climate in American politics, the battle over truth and objectivity is no mere exercise in graduate seminar abstraction. It has very real implications for politics, for human lives, and for the planet. THE AIM AND SCOPE OF THIS BOOK This volume is predicated upon a paradox: that truth is simultaneously indefinable yet central to human communication. In his insightful paper “The Folly of Trying to Define Truth,” Davidson contends that truth is a concept so basic and foundational to ordinary linguistic practice that it is impossible to define it in terms more basic and foundational still. Every attempt to define truth, says Davidson, invariably appeals to concepts that only beg for further definition and clarification. This much is evident in the correspondence, coherence, and classical pragmatist theories of truth. The multiplicity of such theories indirectly betrays the weaknesses and limitations of each. It is tempting to leap from the recognition of such weaknesses and limitations to Rorty’s conclusion that the very idea of truth is a barren and archaic species of metaphysics with no place in serious inquiry. Davidson, however, cautions against this type of rash judgment. Truth, he observes, is a concept like that of mind, belief, meaning, action, good, and right. Truth is among the most elementary concepts we have, concepts without which (I am inclined to say) we would have no concepts at all. Why then should we expect to be able to reduce these concepts definitionally to other concepts that are simpler, clearer, and more basic? We should accept the fact that what makes these concepts so important must also foreclose on the possibility of finding a foundation for them which reaches into deeper bedrock. 67

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Davidson follows G. W. Moore, Bertrand Russell, Gottlob Frege, and Alfred Tarski in concluding that truth is indefinable. However, instead of dismissing the concept of truth on account of its indefinability, Davidson suggests investigating the role that truth plays in ordinary linguistic practice. Rather than getting mired in the project of establishing a formal definition of truth, or a “quasi-definitional clause, axiom scheme, or other brief substitute for a definition,” Davidson proposes instead that we “trace the connections between the concept of truth and the human attitudes and acts that give it body.” 68 Prior to any formal theorizing about truth, we can and do observe that ordinary forms of social interaction are motivated by something we call truth. We should therefore investigate what everyday people intend by the concept of truth in everyday types of context. This volume takes its cue from Davidson by exploring the significance of truth from the perspective of communication studies. However, it moves beyond Davidson’s narrow focus on truth’s linguistic function by examining the place of truth in four dimensions of the public sphere: (1) discourse and communication; (2) ethics and justice; (3) journalism and politics; and (4) visual media, art, and aesthetics. In moving beyond the focus on truth’s linguistic function, the volume sheds light on the practical difference that truth makes to our lives by answering the following questions: How are we to understand the idea of truth in public discourse? How has our evolving media environment affected the shared quest for truth through public reason? What is the significance of truth for public memory and the politics of recognition? How might truth be embodied in the struggle for racial justice? What is the place of truth in education? How does truth function in comedy, especially in political satire? Does fact-checking make a difference in the age of post-truth politics? How do we speak about truth through the new genres of storytelling made possible by digital media? What is the connection between truth and aesthetics? How do photography and painting capture truth? PART I: DISCOURSE AND COMMUNICATION This volume opens with a departure from conventional ways of thinking about truth. In “Towards an Activist Theory of Language,” David Backer works through the resources of Marxist philosophy to propose a political conception of truth. To this end, he draws from the thought of two notable Marxist thinkers. The first is Valentin Vološinov, the Russian ethnologist and linguist whose classic study Marxism and the Philosophy of Language characterized language as the dialectical arena of subjectivity and consciousness. The second is Jean-Jacques Lecercle, whose book A Marxist Philosophy of Language proposed a social, historical, and political view of language as the site of interpellation. Backer synthesizes the central theses of Vološinov and

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Lecercle to develop a conception of truth as the outcome of “conjunctural struggles.” On Backer’s activist view, truth is decided “in the public sphere, through an activist procedure of struggle.” Since language is necessarily ideological, speech is necessarily political. What we say today is, to some degree, a record of the struggles of the past. Similarly, what we say will, to some degree, shape the struggles of the future. We therefore have a responsibility to take care how we speak in the public sphere, since we are as much makers as receivers of truth. In “Habermas’s Account of Truth in Political Communication,” Lewis Friedland and Thomas Hove consider the implications of digital communications for Jürgen Habermas’s view of truth as the outcome of public reason. Being one of the foremost social and political theorists of our time, Habermas’s thought has been subjected to numerous lines of criticism. Chief among these is the view that he romanticizes the Enlightenment and overlooks the many subtle and implicit dimensions of power that shape political judgment and public reason. But Friedland and Hove bring attention to an aspect of Habermas’s project often neglected by his critics: the implications of digital networks for the Habermasian model of truth. That model rests on certain assumptions about the nature of modern communicative settings. Whether those assumptions still hold in our digitally mediated world is by no means obvious. Friedland and Hove therefore ask whether a digitally mediated public sphere can still support the Habermasian model of truth. They then ask whether a public sphere that evolves with ongoing developments in communications technology will undermine the prospects of collectively securing rational agreement about truth. They contend that while the numerous complexities of the Internet present serious challenges, there is still hope for a Habermasian public sphere. PART II: ETHICS AND JUSTICE In “One Word Does Not a Whole Story Tell: Contested Truth on a Highway Historical Marker,” Spoma Jovanovic and research team members Shelley Sizemore, Yacine Kout, Jeanette Musselwhite, Jenny Southard, and Kelly M. O’Donnell explore the politics of historical memory. Drawing from original ethnographic and archival research, Jovanovic and her research team examine the heated battle over the precise wording for a state highway sign commemorating the event popularly known as the Greensboro Massacre. They explore how terms such as massacre, clash, shoot-out, and ambush each hold powerful connotations for how the past is remembered. Their study provides one of the starkest examples that history is not a self-evident record to be mined and read with an impartial eye by later generations, but rather a site of struggle and conflict by rival perspectives in the present. Jovanovic and her

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team reveal the seriousness of that struggle, in which the memory of a dark historical truth is at stake, a memory that could have been easily obscured by a simple choice of wording. Ultimately, they demonstrate the power of critically engaged community interventions into the decision-making process to determine the final wording of the highway sign. In “The Tragic Action and Revolutionary Intent of Black Lives: The Historical Genealogies and Corporeal Dynamics of Cornel West’s Prophetic Pragmatism in Post-Racial America,” historian Paul Lawrie explores one of the most spirited examples of parrhesia, or fearless truth-telling, in the American public sphere. Cornel West is arguably the leading public intellectual in America today. A radical and often controversial thinker and activist with an unusual gift for public oratory, West’s blistering critiques of social, economic, and political inequalities have redefined the very nature of the public intellectual in the modern age. A self-described “blues man in the life of the mind” and “jazz man in the world of ideas,” West seeks to reconcile his scholarship and activism through a philosophy of prophetic pragmatism: a religiously inflected variation on the tradition of pragmatist philosophy that privileges practical activity over abstract reflection. Unlike his teacher and mentor Richard Rorty, West takes truth very seriously. Truth, according to West, is not an analytical matter of correspondence between formal propositions and a particular slice of reality, but rather a way of life—an existential mode that enables suffering to speak. Lawrie provides a detailed overview of West’s life calling to bear witness to racial violence in America’s so-called post-racial society. In “Jacques Rancière, Mass Education, and the Linguistic Adventure around Truth,” Charles Bingham offers an educational conception of truth based on the thought of the social and political philosopher Jacques Rancière. As Bingham points out, compulsory schooling initiates young citizens into different ways of thinking about public truth. These include the traditional, progressive, and critical models. Bingham contends that each of these models is deficient in some way. Instead, he proposes a fourth model, one that is intrinsic to education itself. Drawing from Rancière’s theory of language, Bingham shows how Rancière’s model of truth is dramatically opposed to the three models promoted in and through education. In the final section of his chapter, he explores the significance of Rancière’s conception of truth to the researcher. PART III: JOURNALISM AND POLITICS In “#NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement: On Truth and Lies in an Affective Sense,” Christopher Gilbert reflects on the notorious words on the US Senate Floor of former Arizona senator and Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl,

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who claimed that Planned Parenthood devoted 90 percent of its budget to abortions. Although this claim was demonstrably false, Kyl defended himself on the grounds that his remark “was not intended to be a factual statement,” but rather a way of bringing attention to Planned Parenthood for conducting abortions at all. This brazen and explicit contempt for the truth was eventually mocked by late night comedian Stephen Colbert. As Gilbert observes, in taking Kyl to task through his famed satirical wit, Colbert managed to turn the tables on Kyl by making his mockery of Kyl, rather than Kyl’s attack on Planned Parenthood, the focus of public attention. Gilbert demonstrates that in an era of shameless disdain for truth and truthfulness, Colbert’s concept of truthiness takes on considerable political significance. While traditional standards of truth and justification might have fallen by the wayside, the rhetorical power of truthiness, and what Gilbert terms “affective truth,” reveal a surprising order in what often seems like a disordered public discourse. In “Motivated to Ignore the Facts: The Inability of Fact-Checking to Promote Truth in the Public Sphere,” Jeffrey W. Jarman examines the failure of fact-checking to make much of a difference to public discourse. As Jarman observes, fact-checking is premised on the assumption of a rational public that elevates the ideals of truth and objectivity over partisan agendas. However, recent studies have shown this assumption to be false. The question is why they turned out to be false. Jarman turns to the theory of motivated reasoning to explain the failure of fact-checking. He shows that partisan citizens treat attitude-consistent information as more reliable than attitudeinconsistent information. He goes further by considering a recent study that revealed an inability of partisan citizens to agree on what counts as facts. It turns out that partisanship influences judgments about fact-checking. In “Telling the Truth about War in Six Words,” Lisa Silvestri considers the lessons of the digital media project the Six Word War for truth-telling about the US military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Six Word War was inspired by Hemingway’s provocative and heartbreaking six-word story: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” This early example of extreme short storytelling has since become popular on digital media, in which radical brevity is the order of the day. The genre of the six-word story, today popularly known as flash fiction, is designed to convey a powerful message through a minimal use of words. Silvestri examines how the Six Word War makes sense of messy and complicated wars through simple and memorable narratives. This, of course, raises a problem for the search for truth. Silvestri therefore considers what exactly these six-word stories tell us about the American interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan and what they reveal about our changing attention spans and civic commitments as global citizens.

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PART IV: VISUAL MEDIA, ART, AND AESTHETICS In “A Special Kind of Authenticity: The Portrayal of Civilian Deaths and Injuries in Vernacular Soldier Photography,” Makeda Best analyzes the visual rhetoric of Jason Hartley’s military blog (milblog) Just Another Soldier. As a new type of journalism, milblogs have sparked considerable controversy, as they subvert the norms of traditional on-the-scene war journalism, the latter long having been subjected to government regulation. With the proliferation of digital cameras and camera-equipped smartphones, it is now easier than ever for military personnel to play the role of amateur journalists, documenting their personal experiences as well as the darker truths of military interventions. In the case of Just Another Soldier, that darker truth was the deaths and injuries of foreign civilians. Not surprisingly, Hartley’s blog was forced to shut down. In light of government suppression and control, Best examines how the various image-making tropes and techniques used in Just Another Soldier created meaning for and generated sympathy from Hartley’s online readership. Ultimately, Best seeks to explain how Hartley helped his readership make sense of his controversial subject matter. In “No Doubt: The Politics of Photography in Antonioni’s Blow-Up,” Chris Balaschak considers the medium of the photograph and its epistemic power for “declarative testimony.” He does so in light of the recent flood of news reports in the United States concerning cases of police brutality brought to public attention through both video footage and photography. Intellectual debates about the meaning and possibility of truth in photographs are as old as the medium itself. However, Balaschak finds in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow-Up a thought-provoking interrogation of our uncritical faith in photographs as a neutral and impartial medium of truth. Challenging that faith, Blow-Up provides a stark illustration of how photography constructs meaning, rather than simply capturing it. As Balaschak notes, Blow-Up offers more than a mere theoretical reflection on photography. It goes much further, underscoring the political significance of photography in the Cold War context of 1960s swinging London. By differentiating moving from still images, Balaschak shows how Antonioni illuminates the different techniques by which photography creates truth and meaning. In “Light and the Truth in Painting: Thinking Blumenberg’s Absolute Metaphor of Light Through Cezanne,” Francis Halsall presents a way of viewing truth as the non-conceptual basis for thought. This contrasts with conventional views of truth, in which the core units of analysis are validity claims expressed through formal propositional statements. Halsall suggests that Hans Blumenberg’s concept of “absolute metaphors” enables us to understand the realm of the non-conceptual as a necessary basis for thought. One of Blumenberg’s absolute metaphors is that of truth as light. In Western thought, the idea of truth as light has held a prominent status. It can be found

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in Parmenides’s division of the world into light and darkness, as well as in Plato’s allegory of the cave. Then, drawing from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical reflections on the work of the French post-impressionist painter Paul Cézanne, Halsall shows how the metaphor of truth as light shapes our understanding and experience of the world. This much is evident in the way Cézanne depicts light through paint. Ultimately, Halsall contends that Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic conception of truth subverts classic philosophical dualisms, such as that between mind and body, which lie at the foundations of Western metaphysics. The metaphor of truth as light, Halsall argues, demonstrates how aesthetic practices can be used to think the unthinkable—that dimension of human consciousness in which the non-conceptual is not thought, but felt. REFERENCES Abramsky, Sasha. “Donald Trump, the Most Dangerous Face in the Republican Crowd.” Nation, February 12, 2016. http://www.thenation.com/article/donald-trump-the-most-dangerous-face-in-the-republican-crowd/. Alterman, Eric. “Conclusion: George W. Bush and the Post-Truth Presidency.” In When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and Its Consequences, 294–314. New York: Penguin, 2004. Aristotle. Metaphysics, Volume I. Translated by Hugh Tredennick. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933. Ballard, Tanya N., and Kevin Dumouchelle. “Key Players in the Plame Affair.” Washington Post. October 20, 2005. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005 /10/ 20/AR2005102001487.html. Barstow, David, William J. Broad, and Jeff Gerth. “The Nuclear Card: The Aluminum Tube Story—A Special Report; How White House Embraced Suspect Iraq Arms Intelligence.” New York Times, October 3, 2004. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/03/ washington/us/thenuclear-card-the-aluminum-tube-story-a-special-report-how.html. Berlow, Alan. “The Texas Clemency Memos.” Atlantic, July/August 2003. http:// www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/07/the-texas-clemency-memos/302755/. Bolton, John. “Overthrowing Saddam Hussein Was the Right Move for the US and Its Allies.” Guardian, February 26, 2013. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013 /feb/26/ iraq-war-was-justified. Borger, Julian. “Bush Decided to Remove Saddam ‘On Day One.’” Guardian, January 12, 2004. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/jan/12/usa.books. Burrough, Bryan, Evgenia Peretz, David Rose, and David Wise. “The Path to War.” Vanity Fair, May 2004. http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2004/05/path-to-war200405. Conant, James. “Rorty and Orwell on Truth.” In On Nineteen Eighty-Four: Orwell and Our Future, edited by Abbott Gleason, Jack Goldsmith, and Martha Nussbaum, 86–111. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Costello, Lucas. “Mane Man: In an Election Season, the Relationship Between Hair, Masculinity and Power Come to a Head.” The Globe and Mail, May 5, 2016. http:// www.theglobeandmail.com/life/fashion-and-beauty/beauty/mane-man-in-an-election-season-the-relationship-between-hair-masculinity-and-power-comes-to-ahead/article29883967/ Crock, Stan. “‘Analyzating’ Bush’s Grey Matter.” Bloomberg, March 11, 2004. http:// www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2004-03-11/analyzating-bushs-grey-matter. Davidson, Donald. “The Folly of Trying to Define Truth.” Journal of Philosophy 93, no. 6 (1996): 263–78. doi:10.2307/2941075.

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Diamond, John. “U.S.: Iraq Sheltered Suspect in ’93 WTC Attack.” USA Today, September 17, 2003. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2003-09-17-iraq-wtc_x.htm. Dicker, Rachel. “Anderson Cooper Tells Donald Trump He’s Acting Like a Kindergartener.” US News and World Report, March 30, 2016. http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/201603-30/anderson-cooper-to-donald-trump-thats-the-argument-of-a-5-year-old. Dunn, Susan. “Trump’s ‘America First’ Has Ugly Echoes from U.S. History.” CNN, April 27, 2016. http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/27/opinions/trump-america-first-ugly-echoes-dunn/. Feldman, Linda. “The Impact of Bush Linking 9/11 and Iraq.” The Christian Science Monitor, March 14, 2003. http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0314/p02s01-woiq.html. Field, Hartry. Truth and the Absence of Fact. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001. Fischer, Sarah. “Cheney: Iraq Invasion Was the ‘Absolute Right Thing to Do.’” CNN, July 14, 2014. http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2014/07/14/cheney-iraq-invasion-was-the-absolute-right-thing-to-do/. Frizell, Sam. “Tea Party Candidates Score Election Victories in Neb., W. Va.” Time, May 14, 2014. http://time.com/98964/election-tea-party-senate-gop/. Goldenberg, Suzanne. “Climate Change Denier Sarah Palin: ‘Bill Nye Is as Much a Scientist as I Am.’” Guardian, April 15, 2016. http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr /15/sarah-palin-bill-nye-climate-change-hustle-film. Gordon, Michael R., and Judith Miller. “Threats and Responses: The Iraqis; US Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts.” New York Times, September 8, 2002. http:// www.nytimes.com/2002/09/08/world/threats-responses-iraqis-us-says-hussein-intensifiesquest-for-bomb-parts.html. Gross, Neil. Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Hitchens, Christopher. “Why Dubya Can’t Read.” Nation, October 9, 2000. http:// www.thenation.com/article/why-dubya-cant-read/. Hookway, Christopher. Truth, Rationality, and Pragmatism: Themes from Peirce. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000. Horwich, Paul. Truth. 2nd ed. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999. Iyengar, Rishi. “Here’s the Full Text of Jon Stewart’s Epic Final Rant.” Time, August 7, 2015. http://time.com/3988497/jon-stewart-daily-show-finale-rant-bullshit/. James, William. Pragmatism and Other Writings. Edited by Giles Gunn. New York: Penguin, 2000. Keyes, Ralph. The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004. Kingston, Anne. “Why We Can’t Stop Talking about Hillary’s Hair—Even with Trump Around.” Maclean’s, April 3, 2016. http://www.macleans.ca/politics/washington/why-wecant-stop-talking-about-hillarys-hair-even-with-trump-around/. Krieg, Gregory. “Donald Trump Defends Size of His Penis.” CNN, March 4, 2016. http:// www.cnn.com/2016/03/03/politics/donald-trump-small-hands-marco-rubio/. LaMonica, Gabe. “2003 CIA Cable Casts Doubt on Claim Linking Iraq to 9/11.” CNN, December 12, 2014. http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/12/world/cia-cable-iraq-war/index.html. Lee, Jasmine C., and Kevin Quealy. “The 223 People, Places and Things Donald Trump Has Insulted on Twitter: A Complete List.” New York Times, May 11, 2016. http:// www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/01/28/upshot/donald-trump-twitter-insults.html. Mantzarlis, Alexios. “Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers.” Poynter, October 28, 2015. http:// www.poynter.org/2015/fact-checking-the-fact-checkers/381458/. Milbank, Dana. “Bush Defends Assertions of Iraq-Al Qaeda Relationship.” Washington Post, June 18, 2004. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50679-2004Jun17.html. Moore, David. “Support for Iraq War Drops.” Gallup, February 5, 2004. http:// www.gallup.com /poll/10501/support-war-iraq-drops.aspx. Norton-Taylor, Richard. “Iraq Dossier Drawn Up to Make Case for War—Intelligence Officer.” The Guardian, May 12, 2011. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/may/12/iraqdossier-case-for-war. Orwell, George. 1968. My Country Right or Left: 1940–1943. Edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. Boston: Nonpareil Books, 2000.

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Packer, George. “PNAC and Iraq.” New Yorker, March 29, 2009. http://www.newyorker.com/ news/george-packer/pnac-and-iraq. Peters, Chris. “Evaluating Journalism through Popular Culture: HBO’s The Newsroom and Public Reflections on the State of the News Media.” Media, Culture and Society 37 (2015): 602–19. doi:10.1177/0163443714566902. Phythian, Mark. Arming Iraq: How the U.S. and Britain Secretly Built Saddam’s War Machine. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996. Prejean, Sister Helen. “Death in Texas.” The New York Review of Books, January 13, 2005. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2005/01/13/death-in-texas/. Price, Huw. “Truth as Convenient Friction.” Journal of Philosophy 100, no. 4 (2003): 167–90. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3655652. Quine, Willard Van Orman. Philosophy of Logic. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970. Rabin-Havt, Ari. Lies, Incorporated: The World of Post-Truth Politics. New York: Anchor Books, 2016. Roberts, Joel. “Plans for Iraq Attack Began on 9/11.” CBSNews, September 4, 2002. http:// www.cbsnews.com/news/plans-for-iraq-attack-began-on-9-11/. Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ———. Philosophy and Social Hope. London, UK: Penguin, 1999. ———. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979. ———. Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, vol. 3. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Rorty, Richard, and Eduardo Mendieta. Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. Russell, Bertrand. A History of Western Philosophy. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1945. Rutenberg, Jim, and Jackie Calmes. “False ‘Death Panel’ Rumor Has Some Familiar Roots.” New York Times, August 13, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/14/health/policy / 14panel.html. Shafer, Jack. “Donald Trump Talks Like a Third-Grader.” Politico, August 13, 2015. http:// www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/donald-trump-talks-like-a-third-grader-121340. Sheehy, Gail. “The Accidental Candidate.” Vanity Fair, October 2000. http:// www.vanityfair.com/news/2000/10/bush200010. Stokols, Eli, and Ben Schreckinger. “For Trump, the Truth Doesn’t Hurt.” Politico, March 30, 2016. http://www.politico.com/story/2016/03/for-trump-the-truth-doesnt-hurt-221369. Waldman, Paul. “Donald Trump Is a New Kind of Dissembler.” The American Prospect, May 8, 2016. http://prospect.org/article/donald-trump-new-kind-dissembler. Walker, Ralph C. S. The Coherence Theory of Truth: Realism, Anti-Realism, Idealism. London, UK: Routledge, 1989. Williams, Rowan. “A Nervous Breakdown in the Body Politic.” New Statesman, May 1, 2016. http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2016/05/nervous-breakdown-body-politic. Wilson, Joseph C. “What I Didn’t Find in Africa.” New York Times, July 6, 2003. http:// www.nytimes.com/2003/07/06/opinion/06WILS.html. Wilstein, Matt. “Jimmy Kimmel Tears Into Sarah Palin’s ‘Offensive and Dangerous’ Climate Change Denial.” The Daily Beast, May 3, 2016. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles / 2016/05/03/jimmy-kimmel-tears-into-sarah-palin-s-offensive-and-dangerous-climatechange-denial.html. Yilek, Caitlin. “Authorities Consider Charging Trump with Inciting Violence at Rally.” Hill, March 14, 2016. http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/272923-authoritiesconsider-charging-trump-with-inciting. Zadrozny, Brandy, and Jackie Kucinich. “Trump Rallies Are Getting More Violent by the Week.” The Daily Beast, March 31, 2016. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/03 / 31/trump-rallies-are-getting-more-violent-by-the-week.html.

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NOTES 1. Crock, “‘Analyzating’ Bush’s Grey Matter”; Sheehy, “The Accidental Candidate.” 2. Prejean, “Death in Texas.” 3. Hitchens, “Why Dubya Can’t Read.” 4. Berlow, “The Texas Clemency Memos.” 5. Packer, “PNAC and Iraq.” 6. Borger, “Bush Decided.” 7. Roberts, “Plans for Iraq.” 8. Diamond, “U.S.: Iraq Sheltered Suspect.” 9. LaMonica, “2003 CIA Cable.” 10. Milbank, “Bush Defends Assertions.” 11. Wilson returned with no evidence of Iraq having purchased yellowcake. After the invasion, he wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times suggesting the Bush administration “manipulate[d] intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq.” Wilson, “What I Didn’t Find in Africa.” Cheney responded first by seeking to discredit Wilson. One of his advisors, Scooter Libby, went further and leaked the identity of Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, who was then working undercover for the CIA; Ballard and Dumouchelle, “Key Players.” 12. Feldman, “The Impact of Bush.” 13. Gordon and Miller, “Threats and Responses.” 14. Barstow, Broad, and Gerth, “The Nuclear Card.” 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Norton-Taylor, “Iraq Dossier.” 18. Burrough et al., “The Path to War.” 19. Ibid. 20. Bolton, “Overthrowing Saddam”; Fischer, “Cheney: Iraq Invasion.” 21. Phythian, Arming Iraq. 22. Moore, “Support for Iraq.” 23. Frizell, “Tea Party Candidates.” 24. Rutenberg and Calmes, “False ‘Death Panel’ Rumor.” 25. These include Going Rouge: An American Life (2009), America By Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag (2010), Good Tidings and Great Joy: Protecting the Heart of Christmas (2013), and Sweet Freedom: A Devotional (2015). 26. Goldenberg, “Climate Change Denier.” 27. Wilstein, “Jimmy Kimmel.” 28. Costello, “Mane Man”; Kingston, “Why We Can’t Stop.” 29. Shafer, “Donald Trump Talks.” 30. Dicker, “Anderson Cooper.” 31. Williams, “A Nervous Breakdown.” 32. Abramsky, “Donald Trump.” 33. The New York Times has compiled a list of 223 people, places, and things targeted with insults by Donald Trump; Lee and Quealy, “The 223 People, Places and Things.” 34. Krieg, “Donald Trump Defends.” 35. Waldman, “Donald Trump Is.” 36. Stokols and Schreckinger, “For Trump.” 37. Zadrozny and Kucinich, “Trump Rallies.” 38. Yilek, “Authorities Consider Charging Trump.” 39. Dunn, “Trump’s ‘America First.’” 40. As an example, see Iyengar, “Here’s the Full Text.” 41. Keyes, The Post-Truth Era. 42. Rabin-Havt, Lies, Incorporated. 43. Alterman, When Presidents Lie. 44. Peters, “Evaluating Journalism.” 45. Mantzarlis, “Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers.”

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46. For an outstanding account of Rorty’s early intellectual development and early academic years, see Gross, Richard Rorty. 47. See for example Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 295–312; and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 5. 48. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 141–198. 49. Rorty and Mendieta, Take Care of Freedom, 58. 50. Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, xviii. 51. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 5. 52. See Davidson, “The Folly.” 53. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1011b25. 54. Walker, The Coherence Theory. 55. Hookway, Truth, Rationality, and Pragmatism, 44–81. 56. James, Pragmatism and Other Writings, 97. 57. Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, 818. 58. See Quine, Philosophy of Logic; Horwich, Truth; and Field, Truth and the Absence of Fact. 59. Rorty, Truth and Progress, 19. 60. Price, “Truth as Convenient Friction.” 61. Ibid., 185. 62. Conant, “Rorty and Orwell on Truth.” 63. Rorty, as quoted in Conant, “Rorty and Orwell on Truth,” 91. 64. Orwell, My Country Right or Left, 136. 65. Rorty and Mendieta, Take Care of Freedom, 15. 66. Conant, “Rorty and Orwell,” 107. 67. Davidson, “The Folly,” 264. 68. Ibid., 276.

I

Discourse and Communication

Chapter One

Toward an Activist Theory of Language David I. Backer

At the time of this writing there is a presidential campaign happening in the United States. 1 The campaign has been unique in a number of ways, the novelty of its political discourse chief among them. What candidates in both major parties have said—whether advocating socialism in a country hostile to it, or referring to one another’s genitalia during televised debates—has disturbed many in the public sphere, both in the United States and around the world. President Barack Obama shared this unnerved reaction. He spoke on the subject at Syracuse University in New York on March 28, 2016, at the award ceremony for the Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting. What he said relied on the idea of truth, and the extent to which political campaigns, journalists, and other citizens are concerned with it: “When our elected officials and political campaigns become entirely untethered to reason and facts and analysis, when it doesn’t matter what’s true and what’s not, that makes it all but impossible for us to make good decisions for future generations.” 2 According to President Obama, in the course of a political campaign, a candidate or other citizen may become “untethered to reason and facts” such that “it doesn’t matter what’s true and what’s not.” The implication here is that contemporary presidential campaign discourse has become separated from reason and truth in just this way. His usage of the term “true” is ambiguous, though we might guess at the theory of truth he intends. The word “untethered” implies that a discourse where “what’s true and what’s not” matters is connected, a part of, or otherwise linked to a domain of things that exist about which we might speak truthfully. In other words, that statements and claims and arguments—specifically in political campaigns—aim at cor3

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responding to the world such that they are “factual” claims and statements. Interestingly, President Obama goes on to claim in that speech that candidates, when thus untethered, are merely jockeying for position in a game of power—saying whatever they can to get the requisite attention which will launch them into the nomination and then the presidency. But what if this jockeying for position—attempting to vindicate one’s own status or vision of the world—has a theory of truth itself? It could be that, in political contexts, one must “untether” oneself from the notion that true statements correspond to a reality in order to vindicate one’s position through discourse. It could be that there is a theory of truth in this untethering; a theory of language whose paradigm stipulates that “what’s true and what’s not” are precisely those statements which successfully vindicate one’s position or vision of the world under a specific set of political circumstances. On such a theory, one must untether from reason and facts and analysis in order to speak statements with which others can make decisions for future generations: vindicating one’s ideology seeks, presumably, to achieve an office from which one can guide the course of events. Speaking truly, on the theory of truth just proposed, gets one to such an office. This chapter introduces one approach to such a theory of language, what I call an “activist” theory of language. Thus the chapter serves as a kind of primer for that theory, sketching some important ideas that gesture toward a fuller one. To do this, I present the Althusserian Marxist philosopher of language Jacques Lecercle’s notion of “correctness,” drawing from his Marxist Philosophy of Language. A correct statement—like a slogan—names the present conjuncture (a Gramscian term) and condenses it in such a way as to vindicate an ideological position. In this way, the activist theory of language shares some qualities in common with speech act theory (though differs from correspondence and consistency theories of truth), which is not a theory of truth so much as an account of certain kinds of sentences that are actions themselves. 3 For the activist theory of language, the paradigm of truth stipulates that true statements are correct statements: those which vindicate a particular ideology successfully. While it may be disturbing, what frontrunner Donald Trump has said and continues to say in this campaign cycle, for example, has certainly been effective in vindicating his political position. According to the activist paradigm, he has spoken correctly and therefore truly; whether the public sphere (or the president) likes it or not. TOWARD AN ACTIVIST THEORY OF LANGUAGE According to Lecercle, correctness, as a value of statements, is one way of understanding the implications of Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism in the philosophy of language. Truth-as-correctness says (following the French

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Marxist Louis Althusser) that “a correct philosophical thesis is one that enables adjustment to the conjuncture.” 4 Further elaboration of the important term “conjuncture” will follow in the coming section. A statement is true if it is correct, according to Lecercle, which is to say that the statement permits understandings and actions which accord—are “adjusted to”—a set of contemporary political and social forces. A correct slogan for instance, following V. I. Lenin, identifies the moment of conjuncture and “names the political task corresponding to the moment of conjuncture.” 5 Naming the political task appropriate to a particular set of circumstances is to tell the truth on this theory. A correct statement is also one that “condenses and embodies the concrete analysis of the concrete situation.” 6 Lecercle continues: “The implicit Leninist slogan here is ‘without correct slogans, no successful revolution.’” 7 In other words, correct slogans are necessary for successful revolution and, by extension, successful revolution is one way to determine whether a statement is correct or incorrect; and therefore true or untrue. “Conjuncture” is a crucial term here, since correctness requires that statements condense and embody the conjuncture. Antonio Gramsci writes the term “conjuncture” in the Prison Notebooks as he interprets military history, going back to Caesar’s time in Rome to his own twentieth-century Italy. The term “conjuncture” has a military connotation, referring to “a combination of real circumstances” forming “a moment of the system of relations of force which exists in a given situation.” 8 The conjuncture can include things like “the qualitative condition of the leading personnel.” 9 Generally speaking, “strategic preparation,” which keeps the conjuncture in mind, “tends to reduce to zero the so-called ‘imponderable factors’—in other words, the immediate, unpremeditated reactions at a given moment of the traditionally inert passive forces.” 10 The conjuncture is therefore a set of “factors” regarding the who, what, when, where, and how of existing political forces, particularly in response to possible threats to their current balances (what I will call the “status quo”). This set of factors can also include “the relations between international forces . . . to the objective relations within society—in other words, the degree of development of productive forces; to relations of political force and those between parties; and to immediate (or potentially military) political relations.” 11 Naming a conjuncture entails a kind of reality or fact. Conjunctural facts, following Gramsci, Lenin, and Althusser, are facts of struggle—in a Marxist context, class struggle. Again, the term emerges from discourses on “strategic preparation of the theatre of struggle” 12 and refers, in a Marxist usage, to “the balance of forces between the classes in struggle.” 13 “Struggle” for present purposes may be understood through the lens of contradictions and crises 14 in society which over time populate a conjuncture. A conjuncture is therefore more than just a status quo. It is the conflicted aspects of a status quo, the cracks where the status quo begins to break

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down and to which the forces devoted to maintaining that status quo flock in attempts to seal the fissure. For instance: A crisis occurs, sometimes lasting for decades. This exceptional duration means that incurable structural contradictions have revealed themselves (reached maturity), and that, despite this, the political forces which are struggling to conserve and defend the existence of the structure itself are making every effort to cure them, within certain limits, and to overcome them. These incessant and persistent efforts . . . form the terrain of the “conjunctural,” and it is upon this terrain that the forces of opposition organize. 15

Various struggles over the working day during the industrial era, beginning in an organized fashion in the late nineteenth century with the birth of the labor movement, are paradigm cases of Gramsci’s “terrain” of conjunctural struggle. Such struggles arise around an “incurable structural contradiction” where certain “political forces” seek to prevent, through defense and conservation, other political forces (“forces of opposition”) from changing and threatening a status quo. The length of the working day has been one site of struggle for generations, composing one central feature in the terrain of capitalist conjunctures. The struggle itself comes about from a contradiction in capitalism. In Karl Marx’s Capital Vol. 1, Marx points to an “antimony” between two groups in a capitalist economy. The first group are capitalists who own the means of production, including the productive force of labor power purchased from workers with wages. The second group are workers who act as sellers of their labor power. The capitalist buys labor power from the worker, who sells it for the price of the wage. However, “the peculiar nature of the commodity sold [labor] implies a limit to its consumption by the purchaser, and the laborer maintains his right as seller when he wishes to reduce the working day to one of definite normal duration.” 16 According to the law of exchanges, the purchaser has a right to the commodity purchased—the employer can stipulate how long the working day must be. Also according to the law of exchange, the seller has the equal right to sell that commodity at a certain duration—the worker can stipulate how and when the labor is expended, particularly by demanding (through striking, for example) that the working day be eight hours rather than ten or fourteen. “Hence is it that in the history of capitalist production, the determination of what is a working day, presents itself as the result of a struggle.” 17 For the activist theory of language, this case becomes paradigmatic when one considers the truth or falsity of statements regarding the length of working days. In a hypothetical scenario between an employer and employee, the two have equal rights on the law exchanges to demand that the working day be of different lengths. The employer might say “the working day is ten hours long” and the employee might say “the working day is eight hours long.” Who is correct? How long must the working day be? The notion of

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correctness requires that there will be a struggle, however quick or prolonged, which determines the truth or falsity of these statements. If the employees capitulate or do not otherwise organize themselves into something like a union which then, through collective bargaining, demands a certain length to the working day, then the employer’s statement will be correct. If the employees do organize and successfully push for a contract which stipulates a certain length of the working day (and the employers agree to this contract), then the employees’ statement will be correct. It will be true, in other words, that the employees’ statement about the length constitutes the working day. The truth of the statement making reference to the working day is thereby decided by struggle in the conjuncture, and the side vindicated in the struggle is correct. By extension, the language with which the employees’ enunciate their case—in pamphlets, chants, songs, etc.—are also correct because, with this language, they vindicate their side of the struggle. The workers’ stipulation of the working day’s length as well as their campaign language is therefore true because it is correct, which is to say that they vindicated their side of the opposition in a conjunctural struggle. These conjunctural struggles are how correct statements get their meaning in general: “[It is] the moment of the conjuncture and the conjuncture that allows it to make sense. The conjunctural character of meaning is the content of the concept of correctness.” 18 Correctness is a value which describes the way in which these statements are true. Since correctness in this sense refers to the extent to which a statement names and condenses a conjuncture, it is not circular to claim that true statements, for the activist theory of language, are correct statements. Much like performativity theory (though importantly different, as I will show) a statement “in the last analysis . . . is ‘true’ if it becomes a new reality, if the forces of opposition triumph.” 19 Such statements come about “in a series of ideological, religious, philosophical, political, and juridical polemics, whose concreteness can be estimated by the extent to which they are convincing, and shift the previously existing disposition of social forces.” 20 Vindication, in this context, is precisely achieving such a “triumph” where “shifts” occurs in the existing disposition of social forces. Language which vindicates a side in a conjunctural struggle shifts the balance of existing forces in society, decisively creating a triumph for that side in the struggle. Yet the terms of the activist theory of language go beyond vindication. Certainly vindication is grounds for correctness. If a side in a conjunctural struggle achieves its aims while working within the contradiction at that part of the conjuncture, then statements describing their vindication will be correct and therefore true. There is a distinction here between two kinds of correct statements according to the activist theory of language. One kind of correct statement is true because a side in a conjunctural struggle has been clearly vindicated. The working day example is one such case. When a group

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of employees go on strike with a demand for a shorter working day, there is a clear moment (the signing and enactment of the contract) when the truth about the working day gets decided in struggle. The struggle for that demand ends. A simple activist theory of language would say that only those correct statements clearly decided in a struggle can be true and false. This simple version of the theory would have to proffer a third value, like the “undecided” value of an anti-realist theory of truth, and say that all statements in undecided struggles are neither true nor false. But there are many struggles whose demands are less clear and less likely; struggles which are ongoing, out of which language emerges which distinguish perspectives in conjunctural struggles. A modified activist theory of language, a more inclusive version of the theory, would say that there are some correct statements whose truth results from gains made in the process of vindication within a conjunctural struggle, though no single side has clearly won. Thus the importance of naming the conjuncture, calling for the appropriate action, and embodying the conjuncture. Correct statements according to this inclusive activist theory of knowledge are those that name the terrain of a conjuncture, embody struggle, and call for appropriate action. These criteria may be sufficient for a statement’s correctness, despite the fact that one side in the struggle has not been vindicated. The simple activist theory of language might claim that vindication is necessary and sufficient for correctness. In other words, a correct statement must emerge from a clearly vindicated side in a conjunctural struggle. Certainly (the simple version says) statements which embody, name, condense, or call for appropriate action within a conjunctural struggle are necessary for correctness; but they are not sufficient. The modified inclusive version of the theory is less demanding. Rather than requiring “clear vindication” through a procedure like collective bargaining and contract arbitration (or elections or revolutions, perhaps), the modified inclusive activist theory of language could require one or a combination of naming, condensation, embodying, or calling for appropriate action in a conjunctural struggle when it comes to correctness. Each version has benefits and drawbacks. The benefit of the simple version is that there is a clear line between true and false statements. A drawback might be that there are many statements which are as-yet undetermined, since there is no procedure that can say a side has been vindicated. A further drawback of this version is the question of procedure: how do we know what is an appropriate way to determine a side has been vindicated? A benefit of the modified inclusive version of the theory is that it can be used flexibly to say that certain statements are true or false depending on the extent to which they name the conjuncture, embody the conjuncture, condense the conjuncture, or call for appropriate action within the conjuncture. 21 For example, there may be statements which achieve interpellative saturation in public discourse, a saturation which evinces the statement’s

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correctness even though there has not been a clear vindication of one side in a struggle. For Louis Althusser, interpellation is the “function of ideology,” 22 or the way in which ideology propagates. The French word interpellation means “to hail” and, the process of ideological hailing, as Althusser intends it, “recruits” subjects from among individuals. Interpellation makes individuals subject to ideologies, in other words. Althusser writes that “ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way as to ‘recruit’ subjects among individuals . . . or ‘transforms’ individuals into subjects . . . through the very precise operation that we call interpellation or hailing.” 23 The now classic example of this transition from individuality to becoming a subject of authority is the hailing of a citizen by a police officer. While walking down the street, a police officer says “Hey you!” to a citizen and that citizen turns around, facing the officer. Interpellation has partially occurred here, completing in the officer’s examination of the citizen’s national papers to ensure the person is French and not some outsider. The citizen in this case has become a subject of the state, hailed by the commanding gaze of one of its representatives. Althusser narrates the situation: “There are individuals walking along. Somewhere (usually behind them) the hail rings out, ‘Hey, you there!’ An individual . . . turns around, believing-suspecting-knowing that he’s the one—recognizing, in other words, that he ‘really is the person’ the interpellation is aimed at.” 24 The purpose of revisiting this idea in the history of Marxist philosophy is to emphasize the importance of language to interpellation. The ideology gives the interpellation “Hey, you there!” its meaning. Lecercle echoes the Althusserian aphorism that ideology is allusion more than illusion, for instance. In an activist theory of language, ideology furnishes statements with meaning. 25 Vindicated ideologies compose the meanings of words and statements over time. As mentioned above, it is a matter of debate what criterion is best for deciding when a certain ideology has been vindicated in conjunctural struggle. The phrase “interpellative saturation” was offered, by which is meant a certain critical mass of individuals have been recruited to an ideology such that certain statements have spread so widely as to indicate a kind of vindication. For the simple version of the activist theory, an election might be a reasonable way to determine the correctness of certain statements. When Donald Trump surges in the Republican presidential nominating contest and supporters repeat his talking points and slogans, his success is a criteria by which we can determine whether what he says is true. The phrase “Build a wall!” has successfully interpellated many of Trump’s followers and interlocutors. Given his success in the media, the ways in which conversations about the election tend to focus on Trump, it may be the case that his discourse has achieved interpellative saturation. For many, what Trump says embodies the conjuncture—the contradictions and tensions of the present

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moment—and condenses this conjuncture, naming appropriate tasks to vindicate their side of certain struggles. The simple version of correctness would require that Trump win the general election and become president before saying whether these statements are correct. In this case, the election serves as the procedure by which we can determine if a side in a struggle has been vindicated. The modified inclusive version of the theory however might say that, independently of the outcome of the election, Trump’s name, his slogans, and his ideas have achieved an interpellative saturation which imbues statements from his campaign with truth. They are correct because they have spread, propagating his ideological stance at the site of a number of structural contradictions (which the Republican Party establishment—against Trump—is currently working to cure, as Gramsci would say). To further clarify, I have not specified the exact differences between statements that condense, embody, adjust, or call for action with respect to their conjunctures. These terms describe criteria for correctness of a statement in the activist theory of language. If a statement condenses a conjunctural struggle, it is a possible candidate for correctness. If a statement helps speakers adjust to the conjunctural struggle; if a statement embodies that struggle; if a statement calls for an appropriate action within that struggle— each of these describe the qualities of potentially correct statements (for the modified inclusive version, of course). Lecercle, in A Marxist Philosophy of Language, articulates these qualities, but does not build them out. Looking at some of Donald Trump’s slogans, the differences take shape. “Build a wall!” clearly demands an action at the conjuncture of immigration policy. In one vignette, white students chanted this slogan at a basketball game where their mostly white team played against a team with minority students. 26 Call to action demands that certain things happen in the conjunctural struggle. “Make America great again” condenses the conjuncture (implying the other slogan that “we don’t win anymore”): 27 the United States has lost its power, prestige, or value, and the Trump campaign will restore these to the nation. Condensation succinctly expresses a conjunctural struggle. “We don’t win anymore” (one of Trump’s critical tropes) or “they’re chopping off heads” 28 (in reference to the Islamic State) make the conjunctural struggle felt in a visceral way, embodying the situation. Embodying makes the conjuncture felt. Consider other phrases, like “We are the 99%!” This exclamation was a flagship slogan during Occupy Wall Street, a global movement responding to oppression, mostly in the form of income inequality and distributive injustice. 29 From Al Gore’s utterance of “the wealthiest one percent” in the 2000 US presidential campaign 30 to Joseph Stieglitz’s title “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%” in a Vanity Fair article in May 2011, 31 to David Graeber’s utterance of the same when describing the motivations for a New York City

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General Assembly, 32 to the widespread utterance of the slogan during demonstrations in cities internationally. The statement “We are the 99%!” enabled adaptation to the conjuncture: it helped citizens adjust to the reality of the conjunctural struggle between the wealthy and the working class. Adjustment clarifies the terms of a struggle. Certainly the phrase implies a call to action as well, gesturing toward a task appropriate for that conjuncture: collective action against the financial institutions which perpetrated the crisis. Similar analyses are possible for “Oxi!” from the Greek debt crisis, and phrases from the Black Lives Matter movement such as “I can’t breathe!” The Greek people, in an unexpected referendum held by the Leftist party Syriza, voted by majority against another cycle of loans with austerity conditions from the Troika. 33 The word “Oxi” (Greek for “No”) comes to name a site of struggle between the status quo of debt financing, German economic hegemony, and single-currency policies of the European Union. “Oxi” is a call to appropriate action primarily, demanding a “no” vote to a referendum which asked the Greek people whether the nation should forge another austerity plan with the Troika. Incidentally, while the Greek people voted “Oxi” on that proposal the Syriza government went on to make an austerity plan under pressures from both within and outside their coalition. In that case, no meant yes, so to speak, and “Oxi” was incorrect. In the second phrase, Eric Garner, a middle-aged Black man from Staten Island, New York, was seized by five white police officers, one of whom used a chokehold maneuver on Garner, which eventually killed him. The arrest (murder) was recorded on camera. Garner was supposedly selling a cigarillo and yelled “I can’t breathe!” while the officer choked him. 34 The phrase, as it was adopted by activists, names the suffocating institutional racism in the United States, manifesting now as police brutality. Millions chanted “I can’t breathe!” 35 This phrase embodies the conjunctural struggle between the Black community and White policing (and the criminal justice system in general). Suffocation is a physical happening, something that occurs to the body, but which also represents the inability for members of the Black community to survive and thrive in US society. According to the modified inclusive activist theory of language, these statements are true to the extent that they are correct: the extent to which they enable adjustment to the conjuncture, identify the conjunctural moment, name the task best suited for that moment, and condense and embody that moment. There is another distinction to be made here between a strong version of the modified activist theory and a weaker version. The strong version would stipulate some combination of the criteria elaborated above: condensation, call for action, adjustment, and naming the moment. According to the strong version, if a statement does not meet any of those criteria, it will not be correct. Weaker versions of the theory replace the “ands” here with “ors” in the criteria for correctness, the weakest being that a statement is correct if it

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condenses or calls for action or adjusts or names the moment. The simple activist theory of language will ask for evidence of vindication, rendering this question of strength or weakness moot regarding the criteria for correctness in the modified inclusive theory. A basic articulation of the activist theory of language would be that it’s paradigm of truth is “truth-as-correctness.” Two varieties of correctness have been elaborated. The first version of correctness requires a clear procedure to determine whether a side in a conjunctural struggle. The correct statement, according to the activist theory, is a conjunctural reference: the extent to which it is “convincing” and shifts the previously existing disposition of social forces; names the moment in a theater of struggle; names, adjusts, condenses, or embodies the conjunctural struggle; or becomes a new reality. The activist theory of language, according to Lecercle, thus understands correctness as successful interpellation, but widely successful interpellation. If a statement is correct, then a certain ideology has been vindicated by its proponents such that those activists have achieved an interpellative saturation in public sphere discourse. The cases mentioned previously from Occupy Wall Street, Greece, and Black Lives Matter might be examples here. These statements achieved a certain saturation in the public sphere. CONSIDERATIONS One might be tempted to claim that the activist theory of language presented here is a relativist position with respect to truth. Take Althusser’s idea of interpellation. If an individual is hailed and recruited by a particular ideology, does that mean, according to the correctness paradigm, that the statements riding the interpellation are true? If so, the activist theory claims that true statements are true insofar as someone believes them to be true. But this is not what the activist theory is saying. The correctness paradigm requires that a statement names and condenses a conjuncture and creates a certain “saturation” of interpellations throughout discourse. The landscape of discourse must shift, so to speak, and the statements which compose that shift are correct and therefore true. Those fighting in the struggle learn to speak a certain way about the contours of the conjuncture, learning to understand the politics of their situation in a particular way. This discourse may be offensive, meaningless, or absurd to those who are impartial or on the other side of the struggle. The labels “pro-life” and “pro-choice” from the abortion debate in the United States are examples. Antiabortion activists speak as if they are on the side of life, casting the proabortion side of this struggle as being against life, since the former consider abortion murder. Proabortion activists speak as if they are on the side of choice and freedom, casting the antiabortion side as

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being against choice, since they advocate women’s ability to decide whether or not she should have an abortion (rather than the government). Activists have learned how to craft these terms, cast the struggle in a certain way to vindicate their positions at the struggle. The activist theory of language accounts for the truth of statements containing these adjectives (“Being proabortion is pro-choice”) if they name the conjuncture and spur shifts in the struggle in which they are uttered. Both of these adjectives (pro-choice and pro-life), having crystallized as the labels for the sides in the struggle, are to some degree correct. Again, the way to determine that degree is a matter for consideration. Supporters, successful legislation, or other measurements could in fact measure interpellative saturation. So can usage: if the Oxford English Dictionary adopts a new term, if a meme circulates on Facebook, if “everyone is talking about it,” all these scenarios indicate interpellative saturation. Another point: an activist theory of language is inherently educational. In struggle, words change meaning as activists teach speakers to speak differently. A recent example is the recent shift from uttering “illegal immigrant” when referring to persons living in a country without legal permission to do so, specifically in mainstream journalistic media. Though some refuse to utter the new term, keeping to “illegal immigrant,” the widely-accepted term of art is now “undocumented immigrant.” Kathleen Carroll, senior vice president and executive editor of the Associated Press, explained that The Stylebook no longer sanctions the term “illegal immigrant” or the use of “illegal」to describe a person. Instead, it tells users that “illegal」should describe only an action, such as living in or immigrating to a country illegally. Why did we make the change? The discussions on this topic have been wide-ranging and include many people from many walks of life. . . . Those discussions continued even after AP affirmed “illegal immigrant” as the best use. A number of people felt that “illegal immigrant” was the best choice at the time. They also believed the always-evolving English language might soon yield a different choice and we should stay in the conversation. 36

Carroll mentions how “many people from many walks in life” participated in the “discussions” and “conversation” around whether to use “illegal” or “undocumented” when referring to persons living in a country without permission. These people in their walks of life may be understood as occupying opposing positions at a struggle in the conjuncture. This particular struggle is over treatment of immigrants in the United States. One side of the struggle learned to think and speak a certain way about this struggle in order to vindicate their position within it: a welcoming treatment of immigrants, institutionalizing a frictionless and easy path to citizenship. The other side of the struggle also learned to think and speak in ways that vindicated their posi-

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tion: the harsh treatment of these immigrants, making it difficult, if not impossible, for them to become citizens. The former term, illegal immigrant, implies that a person is a thing that can be illegal, which the conservative side of the struggle (such as Republican governor of Arizona Jan Brewer) maintains as both sensible and sensical. 37 It is easier to treat an immigrant harshly if the person somehow, in their entirety, is against the law and therefore obviously wrong to make a citizen. On the other hand, if a person is thought of as being “undocumented,” then the implication that the person could become documented is built into the utterance, instituting within the term itself the possibility of citizenship. It is easy to see the struggle at this conjuncture in the AP’s back-and-forth decisions regarding the correct terminology. At first the AP decided to continue using “illegal immigrant,” but as the discussion continued, the organization decided to make the change. The way Carroll describes the “always-evolving English language” and how the language “might soon yield a different choice” bespeaks the struggle-oriented quality of usage. It is interesting that she attributes the new option’s emergence to the English language and not the activists who worked tirelessly to learn, craft, and disseminate this usage. It is as though the language speaks rather than speakers speaking the language. In any case, the AP made an informed decision to change its usage, learning to speak differently about persons living in a country without permission to do. The “accurate” usage is now to call such persons “undocumented.” In a debate between the two sides of this struggle, a conservative might say “illegal immigrant” and we might expect the progressive side to respond by saying something such as, “No, these people are not illegal immigrants but rather undocumented immigrants.” The latter contests the truth of the former’s utterance, claiming that a proposition containing the term “illegal immigrant” is false. Rather, the truth of this claim rests on a claim to “correctness” or “accuracy” in accordance with the idea of a struggle within a conjunction. Engaging in this struggle on one of its sides requires an educational activity in learning new ways to speak that vindicate the speaker’s side. While activists learn to speak in certain ways, correctness requiring a kind of educational activity on the front end of activist utterance, there is another educational aspect of this theory: the consequences. In the above example, speakers learn to utter new phrases and terms—learn to speak correctly— when one of the sides in struggle is able, through language and action, to vindicate their side of the struggle. Impartial readers, persons, and organizations learn to speak differently when one of the sides is vindicated: and vindication, in this case, is almost identical to that educational activity. The extent to which a side speaks correctly is directly related to the number of people who learn to speak in their terms. Another way of putting this educational insight is to say that activists are teachers, and speakers not explicitly involved in the struggle but who learn to speak differently from

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activist speech speakers are students. When the victorious side of the struggle emerges, speaking its new learned discourse, new and unfamiliar terms, phrasings, utterances, and enunciations proliferate throughout the conjuncture and the wider society. It is a discursive way of thinking about historical, political, and social change. The movement of “We are the 99%!” from occupation to occupation, newspaper to newspaper, and mouth to mouth, shows how individuals learn to speak those words in a certain way. That change involves the changing of minds and hearts as struggles move forward, and occurs through discourse. Che Guevara, in describing the Cuban Revolution to Uruguayan readers in 1976, described Cuban society at that time as a gigantic school. 38 A contemporary example of this notion of the gigantic school of revolution in language comes from Jill Soloway, the creator of the television show “Transparent.” In a recent profile in the New Yorker, Ariel Levy writes of an interaction with Soloway about gender-neutral pronouns. “A really interesting thought exercise is to say ‘they’ and ‘them’ for all genders,” Soloway instructed me [Levy]. . . . I pointed out that strict grammar forbids using the plural pronoun for a single person. . . . Soloway shook her head vigorously. “All of the magazines and newspapers need to begin to do this,” she said. “The language is evolving daily—even gender reassignment, people are now calling it gender confirmation!” She was getting excited. “The promise of this revolution is not having to say ‘Men do this, women do this.’. . . In a few years, we’re going to look back and say, “When we were little, we used to think that all women had vaginas and all men had penises, but now, of course, we know that’s not true.” 39

Here is a complete example illustrating the activist theory of language, and its educational quality, at the conjuncture of gender and transgender struggles. Soloway, a feminist, “instructs” Levy in avoiding usage of traditional gender categories “man” and “woman.” Soloway teaches Levy not to obey the “strict grammar” which “forbids” a certain way of speaking. That “strict” grammar, interpreted through the activist theory of language, ideologically preserves the gender binary used by one side of the struggle over gender. It is “false” to refer to a singular person with a plural pronoun, in this case, to the extent that it vindicates those seeking to preserve the traditional gender pronouns and ultimately the gender categories to which they refer. Soloway is aware of the politics of this grammar, noting that “the promise of this revolution,” the successful upending of traditional gender binaries, is “not having to say” that the binaries exist. She understands that truth and falsity are values decided by the correctness of statements, and that correctness is determined by the vindication of one’s side in a conjunctural struggle (rather than grammar rules). A consummate activist, she says that magazines “need” to learn to use the gender-neutral “they.” This “need” comes from Soloway’s acti-

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vism, a desire to upend the gender binaries, the way in which the word “they” embodies, names, and alters the conjuncture to vindicate the feminist position. Soloway becomes excited at the prospect of such changes in the language, noting that the “evolution” of the language (happening “daily”) maps to the social change for which she fights. She mentions another example of this evolution in the language containing the promise of revolution: the difference between “gender reassignment” and “gender confirmation.” The former vindicates the traditional patriarchal position, which works from the presumption that one’s given gender, one’s assigned gender, is the more authentic. For the patriarchy, a transition marks a “reassignment.” The latter term, however, “gender confirmation,” privileges not the assigned gender but rather the transitioned gender as being the more authentic, vindicating the transgender community’s position against the patriarchy. The transgender community would dispute the truth of the statement “a transition will sometimes require gender reassignment,” arguing that it is incorrect to refer to that procedure as a “reassignment.” Rather, it is correct to call it a “confirmation” of the person’s gender. (The same analysis holds for the prefix cis when referring to people who continue to identify with their patriarchally assigned genders. Transgender activists would say that it is incorrect to call myself a “man,” for instance, since this is the gender I was assigned at birth. Rather, it is more accurate to say that I am a “cisman.”) Soloway’s final line in this interaction marks another educational insight. Immediately after thinking through the political changes in language, she speculates that in the near future society will reflect that it has learned important lessons about gender binaries. The reflective formulation “we used to think that women had vaginas and men has penises, but now, of course, we know that’s not true” points to an educational shift in the assignation of truth to statements containing gender binaries. This “truth” is not the truth of correspondence, coherence, poetry, or performance. Rather it is the truth of accuracy—correctness—according to a vindicated group who struggled successfully against an existing balance of powers, victorious in their conjuncture, teaching society the truth in the process. PRECEDENTS There are many precedents for the activist theory of language, and ways to clarify its paradigm of truth through contrasts with other paradigms. Lecercle’s thinking is heavily influenced by Michel Pêcheux, another student of Louis Althusser. 40 Foucauldian and Butlerian notions cast subjectivity as being composed of discourse, such that the body is “inscribed” with meanings. 41 Slavoj Žižek’s theory of ideology, drawing from psychoanalysis,

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claims that ideology is a linguistic quality which gives a sense of reality to fantasies about society. 42 Valentin Vološinov, writing in Russia just after the revolution of 1917, anticipated this linguistic turn in theories of ideology; Lecercle also draws heavily from him. For Vološinov there is a difference between the physiological qualities of a thing and its “image.” 43 The physiological qualities of a thing become apparent when it is considered as identical with itself: a hammer has a wooden handle with a metal head shaped thus and so, for example. The image of the hammer appears, on the other hand, when it is considered identical with other things: the USSR, for example. The symbolic meaning of a thing is always ideological, as opposed to its physiological aspects. Claiming that anything linguistic has ideological quality means that imagined aspect of utterance is necessary to it. Whenever we speak about something we refer, to some degree, to its image. The distinction is meant to be intuitive rather than complex and laborious to make. While the physiological hammer has certain physiological qualities, it will appear to different people with different imagined qualities, and these differences map to ideological difference. That “hammer” can mean both the physical and imagined qualities of the object (that it might equally be spoken of as a thing with a wood handle and metal head used for building and symbolizing the USSR, or the god Thor, or John Henry for that matter) expresses the notion that language is ideological. These images accrue within a particular social context, where production and political life are arranged in particular ways. It is obvious that discourse happens within authoritarian societies, capitalist societies, communist societies, and any other manner of social-political arrangement, and that those arrangements will influence and be influenced by the discourse spoken within them. The social milieu composes the imagined aspects of meaning and vice versa. Signs . . . are particular material things; . . . any item of nature, technology, or consumption can become a sign, acquiring in the process a meaning that goes beyond its given particularity. A sign does not simply exist as part of reality— it reflects and refracts another reality. . . . Every sign is subject to the criteria of ideological evaluation. . . . The domain of ideology coincides with the domain of signs. They equate with one another. Wherever a sign is present, ideology is present, too. Everything ideological possesses semiotic value. 44

Signs are material “segments of reality” in addition to being “shadows” of reality. They are things in the world like tables or iPads or pens. A sign however, unlike mere “items of nature, technology, or consumption,” presents something else: a sign presents something other than itself, “another reality,” the presentation of which can occur in a reflective or refractive mode. I say presentative and not representative intentionally, as one possible reading of the above passage is that signs may “distort” reality or be “true to” reality. Yet Vološinov also writes that a sign reflects and refracts “another

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reality,” giving the impression that there are only “other” realities presented by signs, rejecting the notion that there is one single reality which signs may successfully or unsuccessfully represent. The hashtag is one contemporary example of this difference between the physiological and the imaginative aspects of meaning. There is a difference between the proper name “Bernie Sanders” and the hashtag #BernieSanders. The former refers to the presidential candidate who is a democratic socialist, has white hair, is a senator from Vermont, etc. The hashtag, however, originates within a particular discursive community, which utters it in order to label, name, or participate in collective examination of a set of beliefs, questions, or themes: socialism, democracy, racial justice, banking reform, etc. The hashtag “links up” with the social context of the word or phrase’s utterance. The difference between the physiological and imaginative aspects of meaning is like the difference between a word or phrase and its hashtag equivalent. In other words, terms are hashtaggable because they are ideological, not because they refer to certain physiological qualities. It is the ideological quality of language which permits any word or phrase to become a hashtag. The contemporary correlate to Vološinov’s distinction between a thing’s name-as-identical-with-itself and name-as-image is the retweeted, hyperlinked, and “liked” signification of a word, phrase, or statement. The fact that any word, term, or phrase can potentially become a hashtag is one way of expressing the inherently ideological quality of language. Language is not entirely ideological, but there is an ideological aspect of language. The activist theory of language takes language to be ideological in this way, and the decision procedure within that theory which assigns values to statements draws from that ideological quality of language. Jean-Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge contains a theory of language which could be relative of the activist theory presented here. Lyotard politicizes the late Wittgenstein as a response to Habermas’s Legitimation Crisis and the latter’s concept of the ideal speech act. 45 Whereas Habermas assumes that scientific discourse (inquiry, generally speaking) involves an exchange of denotative statements that aim at truth, Lyotard responds that this exchange can only occur because certain connotative statements are presumed beforehand. In other words, there are always rules of a language-game within which (and due to) any inquiry takes place. Since, in Lyotard’s view, the socio-political context (e.g., the consensus of postindustrialism) determines these rules, inquiry corrodes within itself since truth now must rely, to some degree, on the (victorious) rules of the postindustrial language game. Lyotard claims there is a “general agonistics” 46 in discussion: a struggle over what rules will be put in place; a battle between those who accept a consensus and those who do not accept, or are not initiated into, that consensus. 47

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Lyotard’s precedent raises an important point. The activist theory of knowledge has much in common with the theory of performativity popularized by J. L. Austin in How to Do Things with Words. Austin distinguishes the performativity of certain statements in two ways: “A. they do not ‘describe’ or ‘report’ or constate anything at all, are not ‘true or false’; and B. the uttering of the sentence is, or is a part of, the doing of an action, which again would not normally be described as, or as ‘just’, saying something.” 48 Statements involved in accepting marriage vows, naming a ship, bequeathing, and gambling are examples where “issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action.” 49 While performativity describes the ways in which words do things, it is not a paradigm of truth. The activist theory of language might be thought of as a variety of performative statements which, if they do certain things (vindication or saturation), can be thought of as true or false. 50 CONCLUSION The activist theory of language and its paradigm of truth-as-correctness, while similar to the ways in which certain performative statements function, is importantly different than two (arguably obsolete) paradigms of truth: correspondence and coherence. A statement might be true because it refers to something. This something might be observable phenomena, for example. In this case a statement is true because it corresponds to something. On the other hand, a statement might be true because it is consistent with a set of axioms or linguistic habits, like a language-game. The state is therefore true because it coheres with other statements. Contrast these paradigms with the activist theory articulated here. Clear vindication or interpellative saturation may be observable and testable with quantitative or qualitative economic data, but ultimately these processes do not converge on a correspondence to empirical phenomenon, natural laws, or real objects. The truth of statements will depend on the extent to which it names the conjuncture and alters it. Certainly there may be an interpretation of “real” where that which is real is that which is correctly referred to. The activist statement is true because it does something, like the performative procedure, but may also be said to be true based on what it does. 51 This activist truth will, in contrast to the consistency theory, be true precisely because it is inconsistent with the existing set of statements on the other side of a struggle in the conjuncture. As Valentin Vološinov wrote in the final sentence of Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, we might say that the activist theory of language calls for “a revival of . . . the word that really means and takes responsibility for what it says.” 52 The activist theory of language described here is a theory of this precise kind of responsibility: when we speak there is an ideological quality to our language which, over time, has resulted from struggles within

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the conjunctures of society. Meanings have been decided by vindication over time. Our speech patterns, styles, forms, and other discourses tell a history of struggle. Speaking responsibly in this sense means speaking with an awareness of the accuracy and correctness of our statements, that their truth is to some degree decided by conjunctural struggle. Truth is not only decided through correspondence with real objects, consistency with stipulated axioms, poetic expression, or performative utterance. Truth is also decided, in the public sphere, through an activist procedure of struggle. REFERENCES ABC News. “Prepared Remarks of Al Gore’s Acceptance Speech.” August 17, 1999. http:// abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=123085. Althusser, Louis. On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. Translated by G. M. Goshgarian. London: Verso Books, 2014. Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Berenson, Tessa. “Donald Trump Defends Torture at Republican Debate.” Time, March 3, 2016. http://time.com/4247397/donald-trump-waterboarding-torture/. Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Cassidy, John. “Oxi: A Historic Greek Vote against Austerity.” New Yorker, July 5, 2015. http:/ /www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/oxi-a-historic-greek-vote-against-austerity. Colford, Paul. “‘Illegal Immigrant’ No More.” Associated Press, April 2, 2013. https:// blog.ap.org/announcements/illegal-immigrant-no-more. Ford, Dana, Greg Botelho, and Ben Brumfeld. “Protests Erupt in Wake of Chokehold Death Decision.” CNN, December 8, 2014. http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/04/justice/new-yorkgrand-jury-chokehold/. Graeber, David. “David Graeber: On Playing by the Rules—The Strange Success of #OccupyWallStreet.” Naked Capitalism, October 19, 2011. http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/ 10/david-graeber-on-playing-by-the-rules-–-the-strange-success-of-occupy-wall-street.html. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers, 1971. Guevara, Che. “Socialism and Man in Cuba.” In The Che Reader, edited by David Deutschmann, 212–30. Melbourne: Ocean Books, 2005. Habermas, Jürgen. Legitimation Crisis. Translated by Thomas McCarty. Boston: Beacon Press, 1975. Harvey, David. Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Lecercle, Jacques. A Marxist Philosophy of Language. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2006. Levy, Ariel. “Dolls and Feelings: Jill Soloway’s Post-Patriarchal Television.” New Yorker, December 14, 2015. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/12/14/dolls-and-feelings. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Pêcheux, Michel. Language, Semantics, and Ideology. Edited by Stephen Heath and Colin MacCabe. Translated by Harbans Nagpla. New York: MacMillan, 1982. Planas, Roque. “Jan Brewer Will Keep Using the Term ‘Illegal Immigrant.’” Huffington Post, April 22, 2013. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/22/jan-brewer-will-keepusin_n_3134851.html. Rancière, Jacques. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Translated by Julie Rose. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1999.

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———. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Translated by Steven Corcoran. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. ———. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ———. On the Shores of Politics. Translated by Liz Heron. New York: Verso, 1995. ———. The Politics of Aesthetics. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Reuters News. “Trump: We Don’t Win Anymore.” Reuters.com video, 00:56. April 18, 2015. http://www.reuters.com/video/2015/04/18/trump-we-dont-win-anymore?videoId =363906433. Stieglitz, Joseph. “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%.” Vanity Fair News, May 2011. http:// www.vanityfair.com/news/2011/05/top-one-percent-201105. Talking Points Memo News. “High School Basketball Fans Chant ‘Build a Wall’ at Latin Opponents.” March 1, 2016. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/andrean-high-school-basketball-border-wall-trump-chants. Vološinov, Valentin. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Translated by Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1973. Weinstein, Adam. “‘We Are the 99 Percent’ Creators Revealed.” Mother Jones, October 7, 2011. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/10/we-are-the-99-percent-creators. The White House, Office of the Press Secretary. “Remarks by the President at the 2016 Toner Prize Ceremony.” March 28, 2016. https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2016/03/ 28/remarks-president-2016-toner-prize-ceremony. Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989.

NOTES 1. Thank you to the students in the Readings in Communication and Social Thought seminar, Fall 2014, Teachers College, Columbia University. This chapter is a write up of that course. 2. Obama, as quoted by the White House, “Remarks by the President,” para. 13 (emphasis added). 3. Lecercle, A Marxist Philosophy of Language, 40. I would like to thank Jason Hannan for many helpful comments on the original version of this chapter, including this one. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. (emphasis added). 6. Ibid., 97 (emphasis added). 7. Ibid. 8. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 217. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 197 12. Ibid., 217. 13. Lecercle, A Marxist Philosophy of Language, 101. 14. See Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions. 15. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 178. 16. Marx, Capital, 243. 17. Ibid. 18. Lecercle, A Marxist Philosophy of Language, 98. 19. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 178. 20. Ibid. 21. Building out the activist theory of language further would require specification for each of these processes: condensation, naming, embodying, calling for appropriate action, and adjustment. I gesture toward specifying what each of these might mean using examples below. 22. Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, 190. 23. Ibid., 190.

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24. Ibid., 191. 25. Ibid. 26. “High School Basketball Fans Chant,” Talking Points Memo News. 27. Reuters News, “Trump: We Don’t Win Anymore.” 28. Berenson, “Donald Trump Defends Torture at Republican Debate,” para. 3. 29. Weinstein, “We Are The 99% Creators Revealed.” 30. Gore, as quoted by ABC News, “Prepared Remarks of Al Gore’s Acceptance Speech.” Gore said that “under the tax plan the other side has proposed, for every ten dollars that goes to the wealthiest one percent, middle class families would get one dime. And lower-income families would get one penny.” 31. Stieglitz, “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%.” 32. Graeber, “On Playing By The Rules.” 33. Cassidy, “Oxi: A Historic Greek Vote Against Austerity.” 34. Ford, et al., “Protests Erupt in Wake of Chokehold Death.” 35. Ibid. 36. Carroll, as quoted in Colford, “‘Illegal Immigrant’ No More,” para. 2–6. 37. Planas, “Jan Brewer Will Keep Using the Term ‘Illegal Immigrant,’” quotes Brewer as saying, “Well I’m sorry but I believe that if you break the law and you’re an illegal immigrant and you’re in this country illegally, that you are an illegal immigrant. . . . We know they’re human beings, we know that they’re our brothers and our sisters, but we believe in the rule of law and we can’t afford it and we certainly can’t afford the criminal element” (para. 6). 38. Guevara, “Socialism and Man in Cuba,” para. 20. 39. Levy, “Dolls and Feelings.” 40. Pêcheux, Language, Semantics, and Ideology. 41. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power. 42. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology. 43. Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 2. 44. Ibid., 10. 45. See Lecercle, A Marxist Philosophy of Language, 45, for the Marxist response to Habermas’s philosophy of language. Lecercle claims this response turns Habermas on his head, following the way Marx’s philosophy of history is said to be an inversion of Hegel’s. 46. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 10. 47. Ranciere’s work on disagreement and dissensus might be seen as an extension or development of this argument as it applies to democratic political theory and aesthetics. That is, what it means to disrupt the sensibility of an exclusive consensus (ochlos) such that the demos appears. See On the Shores of Politics, Disagreement, Dissensus, and The Politics of Aesthetics. 48. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 5. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., 5–7. 51. Lecercle, 2006, 129. 52. Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 158.

Chapter Two

Habermas’s Account of Truth in Political Communication Lewis A. Friedland and Thomas B. Hove

One of the most comprehensive models of how publics arrive at judgments about truth is that of Jürgen Habermas. 1 But in light of recent developments in communications media and the core political structure of democracies, that model needs to be reconsidered. This chapter analyzes the degree to which Habermas’s theories remain useful for evaluating the quality of public opinion in an age of networked communication. The analysis consists of three sections. First, we review his account of how the media system enables publics to generate considered public opinion. Second, we explain why his description of the media system is outdated, and why that outdatedness creates several problems for his account of public judgment. More than Habermas ever predicted, media systems in many societies have become less differentiated from political and economic systems, and connections among the quality press, elite opinion, and mass opinion are becoming increasingly fragmented. Furthermore, now that public communication has been thoroughly networked and permeated by social media, we can no longer accept the link Habermas assumes between everyday judgments about validity claims and deliberative judgments about public issues. Instead, his notion of mass opinion has been eroded recently in many media systems by (a) the re-emergence of a powerful partisan press and (b) large secessions of people from general interest mass media to homophilous social media. In the third and final section, we identify a series of problems that need to be addressed by any theory of rational democracy. Habermas’s public sphere theory has two dimensions, action-theoretical and systems-theoretical. 2 The action-theoretical dimension focuses on the social and communicative processes that enable people to understand and 23

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justify one another’s intentions and actions. The systems-theoretical dimension focuses on large-scale political, economic, and cultural mechanisms that direct entire societies’ collective actions into regular patterns. Our analysis concentrates on this latter dimension—specifically, Habermas’s account of mechanisms in the media system that guide people in making judgments about truth. His most recent systems-theoretical account of public judgment appears in his 2006 address to the International Communication Association. 3 In this lecture, he outlines his ideas about the conditions necessary for mass-mediated political communication to promote the deliberative paradigm of democracy. According to that paradigm, the primary task for the public sphere is to subject public opinions to a process of rational-critical debate that produces “legitimate” and “considered” public opinions. As is now well known, such a process ought to meet the following requirements: when people recognize one another as members of a group who are evaluating validity claims about issues that affect them, their discussion should be transparent and accessible to the public; all the people who see themselves as members of this public should be included in the discussion and allowed to participate on an equal basis with everyone else; finally, if the people conducting the discussion follow shared standards of rationality, then the opinion that ultimately emerges from their discussion will have been adequately “considered” and “reasonable.” In explaining how these requirements are possible, Habermas assumes a link between people’s capacity to make everyday local judgments about validity claims and their capacity to make system-level judgments about what is valid for the general public: The presumption of [public deliberation having] reasonable outcomes rests . . . on the assumption that institutionalized discourses mobilize relevant topics and claims, promote the critical evaluation of contributions, and lead to rationally motivated yes or no reactions. Deliberation is a demanding form of communication, though it grows out of inconspicuous daily routines of asking for and giving reasons. In the course of everyday practices, actors are always already exposed to a space of reasons. They cannot but mutually raise validity claims for their utterances and claim that what they say should be assumed— and, if necessary, could be proved—to be true or right or sincere, and at any rate rational. An implicit reference to rational discourse—or the competition for better reasons—is built into communicative action as an omnipresent alternative to routine behavior. 4

It is precisely this link between routine behavior and deliberation about public issues that we want to examine and question. Our aim in doing so is to identify some important blind spots in Habermas’s model of public judgment.

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That model, drawn largely from the work of Bernhard Peters, 5 also assumes that, at the social systemic level, a media system serving as a public sphere should play three key roles. First, it should connect political discourse, the elites who dominate the political system, and the broad, diffuse population that comprises civil society. Second, to regulate which of these opinions are best for the public to accept, the media system should act as “a cleansing mechanism that filters out the ‘muddy’ elements from a discursively structured legitimation process.” 6 Third, the media system should help “to ensure the formation of a plurality of considered public opinions.” 7 Only after the irrelevant, incomplete, deceptive, and false opinions are filtered out can those special, considered opinions emerge. Given recent changes in media environments around the globe, there are three problems with this model of the media system. First, it overestimates the degree to which media systems have remained autonomous from political and economic influences. Second, it does not acknowledge the recent transformations of public communication into a thoroughly networked phenomenon. Instead, it assumes that public communication continues to flow in a predominantly one-way, top-down direction, and that a media system working as a public sphere serves the function of a filter. But because public communication now has a networked form, the formation of public opinion can no longer be accurately described with this conceit. Instead, people’s opinions now flow through networks that connect with other networks in a variety of patterns. As a result, third, Habermas’s model cannot account for the degree to which publics have become politically and culturally polarized. While several scholars have addressed the consequences of public communication taking this new networked form, opinions still differ on whether this development is ultimately good or bad for democracy. 8 The following analysis specifies several problems that democratic models of public judgment, and especially accounts of the media’s role in it, still need to address. DEDIFFERENTIATION OF THE MEDIA SYSTEM One central criterion Habermas proposes for a properly functioning media system is its autonomy and differentiation from other social systems, most notably politics and the economy. The reason for this requirement is that, if the media system is to serve as a monitor of the political and corporate sectors on behalf of broader civil society, it must not be captured by either. For a media system to play this monitorial role properly, it should provide journalism that meets two requirements. First, journalists must remain professionally independent from other parts of the social system such as the government, the economy, and the various groups that comprise civil society. Second, journalists and the other elites who appear in the media—politicians,

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lobbyists, advocates, experts, intellectuals, and so forth—need to attend and respond to feedback from the general public. This feedback takes such forms as polled opinions, protests, votes, and other forms of publicly expressed demands. 9 However, in the developed nations of the West, journalism, politics, government, civil society, and the economy can no longer remain structurally differentiated from one another. This issue remains immensely complex, but several social theorists have made important efforts to address it. 10 During the postwar years (1945–1975), structural differentiation in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe reached a high point. Media attained their greatest degree of autonomy and professionalization, with a strong national and local press in the United States and a mixed publicprivate broadcast system with a national quality press in Europe and Canada. Relatively insulated from economic pressures, professional journalists exercised a high level of accountability, performing the filtering role envisioned in Habermas’s model. What made this role possible was its acceptance and recognition by the political sphere in the three dimensions of civil society, the legislative process, and governance. For civil society, the press served as the site for developing public opinion by generating and circulating truth claims, thematizing social problems, and influencing collective belief. For the legislative process, the press aided public decision making to the extent that lawmakers saw it as a separate and relatively powerful institution that could shape opinion and hold them to account. For governance, the press was recognized by public officials as a legitimate and effective monitor of government performance and outcomes, for example in scandals such as Watergate. 11 But in recent years, media systems have lost much of their autonomy to political and economic influences. In Comparing Media Systems, the nowstandard work on this issue, Hallin and Mancini 12 identify four variables of media autonomy: structural differentiation (newspapers, television, mass media); levels of political parallelism (the connection between parties and media institutions); the degree and nature of state intervention; and the professional autonomy of journalists. Based on differences among these variables, Hallin and Mancini derive three models of the press: the polarized pluralist (Latin nations of Europe); the corporatist social democratic (German speaking and Scandinavian nations); and the liberal model (the United States, the United Kingdom, and English-speaking democracies). This analysis, widely accepted in communication studies and political science, shows that media systems are significantly less autonomous in most of the world than Habermas’s model assumes. This has been the case for quite some time, even excluding the cases of media in authoritarian societies and populist democracies (e.g., Singapore and some Latin American countries). In the place of an idealized system derived largely from the German/Scandinavian model, from which Habermas’s filter conceit is derived, many of Europe’s media systems

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are highly elite-directed and politically dominated, while those in the English-speaking world are market-driven. As Hallin and Mancini show, even German and Scandinavian media systems are transforming ever more closely to the liberal model. Now that media systems have become less differentiated from politics and economics, they both drive and are subject to growing political polarization in the public sphere. In the Untied States, for example, high-quality newspapers used to dominate the news agenda, and their influence was amplified by three or four broadcast networks. But now that dominance has dwindled, and the press system has become increasingly partisan. Whether partisanship in the populace drives media polarization or vice-versa is still disputed. 13 Regardless which is the root cause, the mass public and its media have gone through several noticeable stages of polarization. In the case of the United States during the 1990s, cable news rose to prominence, a powerful right-wing media sphere emerged in conservative talk radio and Fox News, and these developments were helped along by conservative media policies such as the abandonment of the Fairness Doctrine. 14 Journalism’s dedifferentiation was also driven by the blurring of the line between entertainment and news. 15 As public interest media regulation gave way to vast market consolidation, the high-quality press declined, and on a mass scale the purpose of journalism transformed from public interest to infotainment. Politics became increasingly driven by spin and spectacle, and political debate and programming took the form of reality television, most recently epitomized in the Donald Trump candidacy of 2015–2016. The polarization and fragmentation of media systems have been intensified even further by the pressures of social media. Beginning in the late 1990s, the relative autonomy of the separate spheres of journalism, entertainment, and personal communication began to integrate into a single, networkdriven media system. Initially, the Internet created new centers for opinion through the blogosphere. About a decade later in the mid-2000s, social media contributed further to fragmentation processes in the formation of public opinion and the circulation and public reception of news. The Internet transformed from a tool of research and science communication into a mass medium. With each successive wave—websites, mass email, social media, and by 2016 a media system driven by its networked qualities—the institutions of the public became knit together in one larger interconnected network with multiple centers. One consequence of this networking process is that the forms of rational argument necessary in a deliberative public sphere were largely subordinated to the dynamics of the emotion-driven, cacophonous argument characteristic of the Internet. Despite this bleak picture, we want to stress that rational argument did not somehow suddenly cease to exist. Universities and think tanks continue to issue social critiques and proposals for reform. Government bodies and legis-

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lative forums continue to consider public opinion. And in the United States, executive actions on issues such as climate change continue to be supported by mixed media strategies, some aimed at rational opinion formation and others at mass strategic persuasion. The key point is that the media system itself has become dedifferentiated, and it is no longer possible to claim that journalism and the other mechanisms that form public opinion are as autonomous from political and economic influence as they once were. POLITICAL POLARIZATION OF THE PUBLIC A second, related challenge to Habermas’s model is the rising degree of political polarization in the West. It is generally agreed that this polarization has occurred together with the growing fragmentation of political ideologies. In the United States these processes are reflected in the increasing divergence of the two major parties’ median ideological views, as partisans on the right join the Republican Party and those on the left, the Democrats. Within these parties, fragmentation appears as internal splits—each party contains, essentially, two parties. In the European parliamentary systems this internal fragmentation is much more evident, with the rise of left- and right-wing parties making substantial gains in all major countries, and governing in some. The causes of this polarization are widely debated, with leading political scientists in the United States arguing a range of views. One school of thought argues that elites are much more polarized than mass publics, and that differences among the public have been magnified and aggravated by a dysfunctional political and media system. 16 Another argues that mass polarization is real, and that it moves in tandem with elite polarization. 17 But despite their differences, both schools agree that the media system has fundamentally changed, and in such a way that it contributes to polarization. This polarized structure makes common judgment and consensus more difficult to achieve in several social and communicative contexts. First, polarization reflects cleavages along regional, cultural, ideological, and racial lines. The fault lines of the polity are hardening as formerly cross-cutting cleavages (which were a source of both conflict and compromise) are becoming redistributed into enclaves. As always in the United States, race is a major fault line, and it has been reinforced by the victories of President Obama in 2008 and 2012. But another fault line is economics, as rising inequality creates new class cleavages. 18 Following and driving this class cleavage is a second polarization that occurs across the lines of education, with larger social rewards increasingly going to the more educated. This pattern reinforces the rejection of factbased discourse itself, particularly among population sectors who are less educated. This shift away from political discourse itself both parallels and is

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further exacerbated by what Prior calls the split between “news junkies and entertainment fans.” 19 The former continue to follow news and public affairs closely, while the latter increasingly separate themselves into mass media and social media environments dominated by entertainment. Third, polarization is driven by the rise of ideological echo chambers, particularly the self-enclosed media worlds of the right in which Fox News and right-wing talk radio capture and reinforce the views of those who are opposed not only to the values of equality but to the idea of fact-based discourse itself. 20 Surveys have demonstrated that Fox News viewers score lower on political knowledge. 21 In addition, they are more likely to be subject to “hostile media perception,” the belief that even news reports that have all the characteristics of neutrality and objectivity are biased because they contradict one’s own strongly partisan views. Fourth, polarization has links with rising authoritarianism, as members of ideologically walled-off parts of the electorate find issues that reinforce their sense of siege and victimization, most notably on the issue of immigration. 22 For obvious reasons, rising authoritarian political currents in both Europe and the United States are in themselves threats to rational public judgment. But they also threaten to establish a cycle of increasing polarization driven by media echo chambers and communicative self-segregation, which work hand-in-hand to increase social hostilities and authoritarian orientations. These currents of political polarization challenge Habermas’s model of the public sphere and political socialization in two respects. First, the fragmentation of elite consensus and ensuing political polarization creates both horizontal and vertical cleavages in the electorate. The dynamics of these cleavages cannot be explained by a model of the media system that continues to conceive public opinion flowing mostly one way and downward, from elites to the general public. Second, as the next section will discuss, polarization now enters people’s lifeworlds more directly through a variety of networked channels. A reflection of the increasing individualization of everyday life, the rise of networked communication makes a bottom-up, emergent consensus anchored in lifeworlds less likely to occur in public communication. THE NETWORKED NATURE OF PUBLIC COMMUNICATION Public communication has become more and more mediated and networked. People still, of course, live their lives among other living and breathing humans, and face-to-face communication still occurs in many everyday contexts of family, school, work, business, leisure, consumerism, and so on. Increasingly, though, not only young people but other cohorts in the population access communication about public issues primarily in a networked

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form, via social media. Habermas’s model of public judgment does not adequately capture this newly networked system of communication because it overlooks not only intensified political partisanship but two other important problems, intensified fragmentation and homophily. For much of the high modern era, the dominant model of mediated communication was Katz and Lazarsfeld’s “two-step flow,” in which the media broadcast public agendas set by elites. 23 The people who paid most attention to mass media—the key links between the media system and the general public—were “influentials” in their local communities, opinion leaders among their friends, family, and acquaintances on matters such as politics, fashion, entertainment, and consumerism. Although this two-step flow model involved a networked structure of dissemination, it still had a linear conception of public opinion as transmitted from elites and media at the top, and then down to the general public by way of influentials. In the present era, much of this structure remains to the extent that there are still elites who attempt to set or influence the media agenda, either by exerting power they already possess or by using sophisticated public relations strategies. But now that so much public opinion is diffused through social media, the media system has become more complex, and agenda setting, opinion diffusion, and audience reception now occur in different patterns. The basic pattern of networked public communication is as follows. First, public communication still involves a multi-step flow, with larger agendas set primarily by elite actors (albeit with more contention and division) and then diffused through traditional and social media. But, second, now that this diffusion has become networked, the two-step flow has thoroughly changed form. Messages circulate freely in a social media “network of networks” that is no longer tightly bounded by traditional media channels or social institutions. For example, when comedians lampoon politicians on their broadcast shows, such clips are more likely to be disseminated via YouTube through social networks, picked up by individuals who act as influentials in their own social networks, and diffused through those networks. If such meaningful units circulate widely and rapidly enough, they can become memes on social media in their own right. 24 Third, although the metaphor of virality often used to describe this diffusion implies that memes travel generally and randomly, they are in fact still diffused through the logic of localized social networks. This localization, however, does not occur predominantly among co-present influentials in physical spaces such as the traditional community. Instead, it occurs within the network structure of individuals (egocentric networks) and the larger social networks in which they are embedded. When public issues flow through these larger social networks they can become the structural foundation for “egocentric publics” 25 or “issue publics” 26 which form, diffuse, and re-form according to network logics. These new publics are distinct from the

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traditional notion of a public. Like the latter, they do include a kind of discursive information and opinion exchange among groups that are larger than interpersonal exchange and small groups (i.e., they are smaller publics). However, they are subject to distorted network dynamics of communicative exchange among predominantly like-minded others. These dynamics in turn have the effects of magnifying the degree to which people perceive other members of the public as sharing their opinions (looking-glass perception) and consolidating public opinion into networked echo chambers that, from within, seem to be completely open. Some have argued that the networking of public communication leads to a more horizontal flow of public opinion. 27 That is, networks of people relatively equal in social status, class, and education can now more easily connect with one another. Taking this view further, others have posited that this relative equality of level leads to a spreading outward (at various rates) of a public opinion that allows for the emergence of social movements. 28 Proponents of this view tend to assume that the public opinion produced by such a process is more rational, even if it does not meet all the requirements of the deliberative paradigm. However, there is no necessary reason to assume that the spreading outward of public opinion subjects it to a process of filtered judgment. Rather, the main consequence is that public opinion becomes relatively more participatory and arguably democratic, but not necessarily more rationally considered. In a further complication, the filter model of public judgment cannot adequately deal with other networked phenomena. Even when people address public issues in localized networks, these networks are now pervasively linked via social media. Various commentators have noted that Habermas has never shown much interest in, or knowledge about, the Internet. Certainly by 2006, the Internet and Web 2.0 were becoming increasingly more significant influences in political communication. Up to that time, Habermas still assumed that “mediated political communication is carried on by an elite.” 29 He relegated his comments on the Internet’s roles in political communication to a footnote, and he imagined only two: a force of resistance against censorship in authoritarian societies, and a platform on which people could associate with one another in “issue publics.” But he viewed these issue publics as fundamentally isolated and fragmented, unable to attain wider political significance unless they attach themselves to the expressions of “the quality press . . . national newspapers and political magazines.” 30 This assumption was arguably true in 2006, but the system of quality press to which fragmented publics were to attach themselves was already in crisis. A key aspect of that crisis is that public opinion is now subject to the logic and dynamics of homophily, or the tendency to select others in one’s network who are similar to oneself. Of course, homophily has always been a phenomenon in social life, and it has not suddenly displaced all other forms of

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association. We still inevitably encounter different people and views in our everyday lives because we continue to be embedded in cross-cutting institutions of school, work, and civic association. 31 But formerly, networks that were homophilous in one dimension such as class, religion, or worldview were crosscut by others such as gender and age. The rise of social media and the networking of public opinion, however, have intensified social clustering patterns of smaller publics detaching themselves from one another. Sometimes this clustering is produced by people’s own choices, but at other times it is produced by the market-driven steering of search engines, websites, social media platforms, and other online mechanisms. 32 No matter how these clustering patterns are produced, they end up aggravating public fragmentation and increasing the potential for homophilous groups to become self-isolating enclaves. Because clustering is so likely to occur in networked communication, it can always potentially subject deliberative discussion to unraveling. This unraveling increasingly takes the form of direct assaults on truth claims issued through either the mass media or social media. Researchers and commentators have warned about these likelihoods for years. Over a decade ago, Sunstein 33 predicted that the personal tailoring of a “daily me” or “daily we” of media content from the Internet would deprive publics of not only shared collective experiences but also unanticipated encounters with new information and different worldviews. For a recent example, more and more news is circulated via social media, with nineteen- to twenty-four-year-olds getting 61 percent of it from Facebook alone. 34 This new dissemination pattern has a dual corrosive effect on public communication: on the one hand, it intensifies homophily; on the other hand, if many young people now identify the source of their news as just “Facebook” or some equivalent, it leads to a gradual delegitimation of traditional news sources. Whether the networking of public opinion leads to greater potential for social movements to spread horizontally, a greater potential for social fragmentation and clustering via homophily, or some combination is, of course, an empirical question, and several studies have addressed it as such. 35 While this question remains mostly unresolved, we raise a related theoretical question about the conditions necessary for public judgment: In an era of networked public communication, what are the mechanisms that are necessary to generate considered public opinion? The silence of Habermas and others on this issue reflects the possibility that such a mechanism may not exist.

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CONCLUSION: THE LINK BETWEEN EVERYDAY JUDGMENTS AND PUBLIC JUDGMENTS Habermas’s model of public judgment remains important and worth building upon because it suggests how considered public opinion is produced jointly by the media system and people’s individual judgments. But another key area where it needs to be refined is its account of the link between informal individual judgment and considered public judgment. Because his mature theory remains rooted in communicative action, it effectively maintains that judgment is still grounded in a transcendental-pragmatic understanding of truth claims and argument. He takes this reasoning further by arguing that people’s routine competence ultimately translates into a competence for making public judgments. That is to say, any competent speaker of everyday language, who can routinely raise and contest validity claims, is also in principle capable of more advanced public deliberation. We regard this as a continuing bedrock of his model: competent speakers can engage in a chain of discursive reasoning that leads from the more routine and immediate to the more abstract and universal. If, for example, you can contest whether your boss has the right to ask you to fetch his lunch, you should be able, after a series of examinations of mediated discursive claims, to ask whether he is exercising legitimate power over you, and by extension whether the power of other authority figures is legitimate. This quasi-anthropological assumption continues to require extensive examination from a variety of theoretical and empirical perspectives. But to relate them to the issue of public judgment in an era of networked communication, we raise three questions that future research needs to explore. 1. Even if the claims for communicative reason remain sound at a transcendental-pragmatic level, do they adequately describe the actual contexts of everyday reasoning? A long line of research developed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky argues that when individuals have to answer questions that they are uncertain about, they do not reason discursively but follow heuristics and biases, for example anchoring, the availability heuristic, unrealistic optimism, pluralistic ignorance, the affect heuristic, and many others. 36 Our reasoning is shaped by these heuristics and biases, which in turn take narrative form as the universe of stories and examples that we have to select from. We view this as one of the central challenges to the practical application of the theory of communicative action to public judgment, one that, to our knowledge, Habermas has never taken up. Simply put, if we do not reason discursively but heuristically, it is difficult to apply the transcendental-pragmatic framework to everyday judgment of any sort. At minimum, future discussion of this question needs to

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extend the work of Rienstra and Hook 37 and continue building accounts of how the theory of communicative action is qualified or limited by heuristic reasoning. 2. Closely related, even if we assume people do engage in a form of communicative reasoning in some lifeworld contexts, what precisely is the structure of the chain that would lead from deliberative reasoning about everyday practices in the lifeworld to the ability or the will (two separate and equally important problems) to move further to political judgment? Perhaps the link between everyday reasoning and political reasoning is less robust than Habermas has always claimed. There are contextual capacities that, while not in principle limiting, simply form a kind of self-limiting barrier to moving from the everyday to the “public,” or from mundane levels of publicity (“Who made him the boss?”) to higher levels (“Why don’t we have adequate union representation in this shop? Is this situation fundamentally fair?”). Lifeworld contexts are structured in a variety of ways, for example by media effects, moral psychology, and cultural discourses. The power of media effects such as agenda setting, priming, framing, and hostile media perceptions has been sufficiently established by communication research. Agenda setting establishes the context of what public issues are salient; priming cues individuals what to think about; framing establishes the context of hermeneutic reasoning; and hostile media perception leads to attributions of bias driving polarization. 38 These effects shape how humans make sense of the world in a mediasaturated environment, and they further limit and channel the type of heuristic reasoning explicated by Kahneman and Tversky. Adding an additional layer of complexity to accounts of political reasoning are differences in moral worldviews. The cognitive moral psychology of Haidt, 39 for example, suggests a fundamental difference in worldview between liberals and conservatives, with the former cognitively biased toward freedom and the latter security. Haidt has presented persuasive empirical evidence that these orientations fundamentally shape moral and political judgments. Finally, Strauss’s 40 cognitive-discursive anthropological account of public opinion formation documents how individuals acquire “conventional discourses” about public issues through both the media and social networks. These discourses provide individuals with repertoires of opinion formation, but they often contradict one another. In everyday life, people do not so much reason through these contradictions as state them, switching among them as paradoxes or counterfactuals arise. What these three diverse sets of frameworks have in common is that they all suggest psychological contexts that limit reasoning, and which themselves are shaped by the discursive media, moral, or cultural frameworks available.

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3. Even if we were to discount these cognitive, moral-psychological, and cultural limits to everyday reasoning, and to retain the view that the claim-evaluating capacity of communicative action remains “inherent” in everyday reasoning, do some of the forms of communication that have proliferated on the Internet change the flow of opinion formation in fundamental ways? Bohman has noted that “mediated many-to-many communication may increase interactivity without preserving the essential features of dialogue, such as responsive uptake. Further, the Internet may be embedded in institutions that do not help in transforming its communicative space into a public sphere.” 41 In various types of networked communication, there is technically none of the back-and-forth exchange that is typical of argument (“Really?” “Do you mean x?” “Why?”). Also, there is emerging evidence that political discussion on the Internet is driven by emotional cycles of angry response. Communicative exchange becomes broken by other forms of response, most notoriously trolling. None of these problems render Habermas’s model completely inoperative. They do, however, suggest that an anthro-politically embedded capacity for reason by no means guarantees that it can be used to engage in rational political discourse leading to judgment, much less that it will be. Once we acknowledge this point, we can begin to look for forms of communication that are more or less likely to motivate people to use this capacity. While empirical findings about public judgment illuminate many of the constraints on it, one thing that remains necessary is an overarching theoretical framework. We still need an account of public judgment that shows how people might work through contradictions in public discourse while constrained by heuristic reasoning on the one hand and embedded in network-structured media driven discourse on the other. It remains to be seen whether a model that fully acknowledges these constraints promises hope or despair for democracy. On the hopeful side, John Keane sees great democratic potential in current conditions of communicative abundance, arguing that the constant overflow of messages in daily life encourages skepticism about unaccountable forms of power, particularly in governments and corporations. 42 In turn, this skepticism leads to a form of engagement in which citizens who know their own interests are best equipped to scan the informational horizon and gather only the most relevant knowledge they need to advance those interests. Borrowing terminology from Michael Schudson, 43 Keane calls this monitory democracy. What distinguishes it from Habermas’s deliberative model is that it demands less sustained attention and cognitive competence from ordinary citizens. But while Keane’s predictions are plausible, it is equally possible that we have entered a period of radical indeterminacy regarding truth in both the macro-

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public sphere and the lifeworld. The macro-conditions for reaching public agreement may have become so degraded that the necessary institutional conditions for public deliberation at all levels (the public sphere, political parties, legislative bodies, and the institutions of mass public opinion) no longer function to create the conditions of possibility for reaching rational agreement. Even within the bifurcated public spheres of polarized politics, considered public opinion faces extreme difficulties in becoming formed, much less being processed to conclusion at the level of society-wide agreement. To extend public sphere theories into the twenty-first century, future models of public communication will need to build on Habermas’s great achievement while being tempered by the discoveries of cognitive psychology, the increasing political polarization of societies, and the pervasively networked state of the media system. REFERENCES Abramowitz, Alan I. The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization, and American Democracy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Alexander, Jeffrey C. “The Mass News Media in Systemic, Historical and Comparative Perspective.” In Differentiation Theory and Social Change: Comparative and Historical Perspectives, edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander and Paul Colomy, 323–68. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Alexander, Jeffrey C., and Paul Burbank Colomy, eds. Differentiation Theory and Social Change: Comparative and Historical Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Arceneaux, Kevin, and Martin Johnson. “More a Symptom than a Cause.” In American Gridlock: The Sources, Character, and Impact of Political Polarization, edited by James Thurber and Antoine Yoshinaka, 309–36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Ariely, Dan. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. New York: Harper, 2008. Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. Bennett, W. Lance, and Shanto Iyengar. “A New Era of Minimal Effects? The Changing Foundations of Political Communication.” Journal of Communication 58, no. 4 (2008): 707–31. doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.2008.00410.x. Bennett, W. Lance, and Alexandra Segerberg. The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Benson, Rodney, and Erik Neveu. Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2005. Bimber, Bruce, Andrew Flanagin, and Cynthia Stohl. Collective Action in Organizations: Interaction and Engagement in an Era of Technological Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Bohman, James. “Expanding Dialogue: The Internet, the Public Sphere and Prospects for Transnational Democracy.” The Sociological Review 52, no. S1 (2004): 131–55. doi:10.1111/j.1467-954X.2004.00477.x. Bourdieu, Pierre. On Television and Journalism. London: Pluto Press, 1998. Couldry, Nick, and Joseph Turow. “Advertising, Big Data, and the Clearance of the Public Realm: Marketers’ New Approaches to the Content Subsidy.” International Journal of Communication 8 (January 2014): 1710–26. http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/2166/ 1161.

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Fairleigh Dickinson University. “What You Know Depends on What You Watch: Current Events Knowledge across Popular News Sources.” Public Mind Poll, May 3, 2012. http:// publicmind.fdu.edu/2012/confirmed/. Fiorina, Morris P., and Samuel J. Abrams. Disconnect: The Breakdown of Representation in American Politics. Vol. 11. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012. Gottfried, Jeffrey, and Michael Barthel. “How Millennials’ Political News Habits Differ from Those of Gen Xers and Baby Boomers.” Pew Research Center, June 1, 2015. http:// www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/06/01/political-news-habits-by-generation/. Habermas, Jürgen. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Translated by William Rehg. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. ———. “Political Communication in Media Society: Does Democracy Still Enjoy an Epistemic Dimension? The Impact of Normative Theory on Empirical Research.” Communication Theory 16 (2006): 411–26. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2885.2006.00280.x. ———. The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984. ———. The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 2: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1987. Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Random House, 2012. Hallin, Daniel, and Paolo Mancini. Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Heath, Joseph. “System and Lifeworld.” In Jürgen Habermas: Key Concepts, edited by Barbara Fultner, 74–90. Durham, England: Acumen, 2011. Hetherington, Marc J., and Jonathan D. Weiler. “Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics, Still?” In American Gridlock: The Sources, Character, and Impact of Political Polarization, edited by James Thurber and Antoine Yoshinaka, 86–112. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Jamieson, Kathleen H., and Joseph N Cappella. Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Kahneman, Daniel, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky, eds. Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Katz, Elihu, and Paul F. Lazarsfeld. Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communication. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1955. Keane, John. Democracy and Media Decadence. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Kim, Young Mie. “Issue Publics in the New Information Environment: Selectivity, Domain Specificity, and Extremity.” Communication Research 36, no. 2 (2009): 254–84. doi:10.1177/0093650208330253. Morozov, Evgeny. The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. New York: PublicAffairs, 2011. Mutz, Diana Carole. Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative versus Participatory Democracy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Nahon, Karine, and Jeffery Hemsley. Going Viral. Cambridge: Polity, 2013. Pariser, Eli. The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. New York: Penguin, 2011. Prior, Markus. Post-Broadcast Democracy: How Media Choice Increases Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Rienstra, Byron, and Derek Hook. “Weakening Habermas: The Undoing of Communicative Rationality.” Politikon: South African Journal of Political Studies 33, no. 3 (2006): 313–39. doi:10.1080/02589340601122950. Rojas, Hernando. “Egocentric Publics and Perceptions of the Worlds Around Us.” In New Technologies and Civic Engagement: New Agendas in Communication, edited by Homero Gil de Zuniga Navajas, 93–102. New York: Routledge, 2015. Schudson, Michael. The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life. New York: Free Press, 1998.

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———. Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past. New York: Basic Books, 1992. Shifman, Limor. Memes in Digital Culture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013. Strauss, Claudia. Making Sense of Public Opinion: American Discourses about Immigration and Social Programs. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Stroud, Natalie Talia Jomini, and Alexander Curry. “The Polarizing Effects of Partisan and Mainstream News.” In American Gridlock: The Sources, Character, and Impact of Political Polarization, edited by James Thurber and Antoine Yoshinaka, 337–54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Sunstein, Cass R. Republic.com. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Turow, Joseph. The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013. Vaidhyanathan, Siva. The Googlization of Everything (and Why We Should Worry). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011. Webster, James G., and Thomas B. Ksiazek. “The Dynamics of Audience Fragmentation: Public Attention in an Age of Digital Media.” Journal of Communication 62, no. 1 (2012): 39–56. doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.2011.01616.x. Wells, Christopher. The Civic Organization and the Digital Citizen. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Wessler, Hartmut. Public Deliberation and Public Culture: The Writings of Bernhard Peters, 1993-2005. Transformations of the State. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Williams, Bruce A., and Michael X. Delli Carpini. After Broadcast News: Media Regimes, Democracy, and the New Information Environment. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Wojcieszak, Magdalena, and Hernando Rojas. “Correlates of Party, Ideology and Issue Based Extremity in an Era of Egocentric Publics.” The International Journal of Press/Politics 16, no. 4 (2011): 488–570. doi:10.1177/1940161211418226.

NOTES 1. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vols. 1 and 2; Habermas, Between Facts and Norms. 2. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, 153–97; for a helpful overview, see Heath, “System and Lifeworld.” 3. Habermas, “Political Communication in Media Society.” 4. Ibid., 413. 5. Wessler, Public Deliberation and Public Culture. 6. Habermas, “Political Communication in Media Society,” 416. 7. Ibid., 416. 8. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks; Bennett and Segerberg, The Logic of Connective Action; Morozov, The Net Delusion; and Wells, The Civic Organization. 9. Habermas, “Political Communication in Media Society,” 421–22. 10. For an early overview see Alexander and Colomy (eds.), Differentiation Theory and Social Change; for the media system see Alexander, “The Mass News Media”; Benson and Neveu, Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field; and Bourdieu, On Television and Journalism. 11. Schudson, Watergate in American Memory. 12. Hallin and Mancini, Comparing Media Systems. 13. Arceneaux and Johnson, “More a Symptom than a Cause”; and Stroud and Curry, “The Polarizing Effects of Partisan and Mainstream News.” 14. Jamieson and Capella, Echo Chamber. 15. Prior, Post-Broadcast Democracy; and Williams and Delli Carpini, After Broadcast News. 16. Fiorina and Abrams, Disconnect. 17. Abramowitz, The Disappearing Center, 2010. 18. Ibid.

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19. Prior, Post-Broadcast Democracy, 214. 20. Jamieson and Capella, Echo Chamber. 21. For example, Fairleigh Dickinson University’s “What You Know Depends on What You Watch.” 22. Hetherington and Weiler, “Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics, Still?” 23. Katz and Lazarsfeld, Personal Influence. 24. Nahon and Hemsley, Going Viral; and Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture. 25. Rojas, “Egocentric Publics and Perceptions of the Worlds Around Us”; Wojcieszak and Rojas, “Correlates of Party.” 26. Kim, “Issue Publics in the New Information Environment.” 27. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks. 28. Bennett and Segerberg, The Logic of Connective Action. 29. Habermas, “Political Communication in Media Society,” 416. 30. Ibid., 423, note 3. 31. Mutz, Hearing the Other Side. 32. Couldry and Turow, “Advertising, Big Data, and the Clearance of the Public Realm”; Pariser, The Filter Bubble; Turow, The Daily You; and Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything. 33. Sunstein, Republic.com. 34. Gottfried and Barthel, “How Millennials’ Political News Habits Differ.” 35. Bennett and Segerberg, The Logic of Connective Action; Bimber, Flanagin, and Stohl, Collective Action in Organizations; and Webster and Ksiazek, “The Dynamics of Audience Fragmentation.” 36. Ariely, Predictably Irrational; Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow; and Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky, Judgment under Uncertainty. 37. Rienstra and Hook, “Weakening Habermas.” 38. For a recent critical overview see Bennett and Iyengar, “A New Era of Minimal Effects?” 39. Haidt, The Righteous Mind. 40. Strauss, Making Sense of Public Opinion. 41. Bohman, “Expanding Dialogue,” 135. 42. Keane, Democracy and Media Decadence, 77–108. 43. Schudson, The Good Citizen, 311.

II

Ethics and Justice

Chapter Three

One Word Does Not a Whole Story Tell Contested Truth on a Highway Historical Marker Spoma Jovanovic, Shelley Sizemore, Yacine Kout, Jeanette Musselwhite, Jenny Southard, and Kelly M. O’Donnell

When a panel of historians approved wording submitted by a grassroots coalition to commemorate the Greensboro Massacre for a state highway sign, the uproar from a vocal contingent of the city’s white community leaders was immediate. This chapter highlights the tensions surrounding our country’s civil rights history that have lingering implications for communities everywhere seeking to reconcile uncomfortable truths of the past and present through a commitment to ethics and social justice. In this chapter, we detail the processes and discourses involved to address a community’s grappling with language, truth, and the twenty-five words used to communicate about an episode in history that has been variously described as a massacre, clash, shoot-out, and ambush. Through ethnographic inquiry, a review of the historical records, and interviews with community members, elected leaders, and state officials, we offer a story of struggle over one word that could expose the truth of a past still contested, with attention to the community voices that influenced the final decision-making process.

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GREENSBORO MASSACRE Ku Klux Klan members and American Nazis, on Nov. 3, 1979, shot and killed five Communist Workers Party members one-tenth mile north. —NC Highway Historical Marker ID J-28, installed May 24, 2015

After more than thirty years of grief, debate, and painful community conversations, a highway historical marker was installed in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 2015 to recognize the events of November 3, 1979, when members of the Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi Party killed five protestors at a rally organized by the Communist Workers Party. For the survivors and their families and friends, the marker’s installation provided an everlasting opportunity to ignite community dialogue and truth-telling. That episode in history had been variously described as a massacre, clash, shoot-out, and ambush, with each word revealing a differing view of blame and accountability. For contemporary activists, the push for the marker was part of a continuing struggle for racial justice and the affirmation of truth as a bedrock feature of a strong democracy. 1 A woman named Karen, who attended a public meeting on the marker controversy, explained, “Here’s an opportunity to honor not only those who gave their lives, but also to recognize the difficulty of those who survived. It’s about time we told the truth, at the place of the truth, at the time we are in now.” 2 For opponents, including some members of the Greensboro City Council, the marker’s installation was an unnecessary, hurtful reminder of violence they believed would be better forgotten. They argued that the moniker, Greensboro Massacre, reflected a “bias through its implications of the innocence of those departed.” 3 One councilman’s frustration was palpable when he exclaimed, “How does this help Greensboro?” 4 Central to the struggle for meaning and acknowledgment of the city’s past and current identity were contested views of history, ideological differences surrounding the community itself, and a question of whose voices hold the truth. 5 Greensboro’s past, like that more generally of the South, contained the fundamental truth of institutionally embedded discriminatory practices that for many remained difficult to reconcile in conversation, thus requiring persistent efforts for social change. In the United States, memorials, monuments, and highway marker signs have emerged as potent public spaces with the rhetorical force to name and remember the past. In so doing, they may form a collective memory that cultivates a sense of belonging or ignites feelings of alienation. 6 They can also spark important community conversations to bring forward the views and perspectives previously written out of history. In this context, community voices rang loud in Greensboro, North Carolina, against the opposition

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of those in seats of power in an effort to transform a cast aluminum sign from a simple landmark to a site of rhetorical and historical significance. The process of naming and remembering the Greensboro Massacre in this way is part of a larger national narrative involving past and present racial and economic strife in the South. Throughout the twentieth century, and arguably still, historian Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore documents, “Racial oppression reigned supreme, controlling not only public space but public conversation and private conscience.” 7 For Greensboro, what transpired on November 3, 1979, that gave rise to the talk for a highway historical marker “was a watershed moment that made clear the consequences of not attending to the deep economic, racial and social rifts.” 8 In the decades that followed the events of November 3, relationships between blacks and the police deteriorated, as did trust of city leaders by all of Greensboro’s citizens. 9 Communication about critical matters had been all but squashed and in its wake was left suspicion, distrust, and anger. To talk about November 3 required reconciling different understandings of history, and differing views of the city’s priorities, both past and present. National and international attention through the years had in fact recognized the significance surrounding November 3 and its aftermath. Representatives from around the world even convened in Greensboro to discuss how the survivors and supporters successfully kept attention focused on the need to talk about what political leaders refused to address. 10 Philanthropic organizations awarded the survivors large awards for their work for truth and reconciliation. 11 Still, the political elite in Greensboro had convincingly argued to bury the past by omitting any public recognition of the Greensboro Massacre and refusing to acknowledge the city’s role in the violence that transpired that day. Further, in 2001, the city demolished the aging Morningside Homes public housing community, and with it, the intersection of Carver and Everett Streets where the massacre occurred. The call for truth remained a passion of survivors, their families, and supporters for whom remembrance of the massacre was an important act of reconciliation, acknowledgment, and government accountability. They had already lived through three court cases, a grand jury investigation, three made for television productions, an original theatrical play, dozens of documentaries, five books, thousands of newspaper articles, and the first truth and reconciliation commission in the United States. For them, the next step was to seek approval from the North Carolina Highway Historical Marker Program for a highway marker to designate the location where the Greensboro Massacre occurred. To do so would mean the event could no longer be buried. To do so was to recognize that the massacre was significant not only for the survivors, but also for the people in the state of North Carolina, and by extension the South, as part of that larger conversation required about race and labor relations.

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In this chapter, we detail the processes and discourse in this conflict over language, truth, and twenty-five words. Through ethnographic inquiry at community meetings and events, a review of historical records, and interviews with state officials, activists, and survivors, we investigate where truth is located in the telling of our histories. We found one word—massacre—can indeed hold the power to expose or hide the truth. We further note how an acknowledgment of the past carries significance in a democratic society and how community organizers who unite to promote discourses that ring with phenomenological truth for survivors of racial violence expand the possibilities for important community conversations. THE GREENSBORO MASSACRE, NOVEMBER 3, 1979 To understand why the Greensboro Massacre is worth memorializing, it is important to review, briefly, the story of November 3, 1979. That history is replete with resilience by the survivors and their supporters who mounted effort after effort to resist the dominance of white supremacy in naming the event a shootout rather than a massacre. The words we use to inscribe history, when chosen by those in positions of power, too often fail to acknowledge the truths involving deep struggle, hurt, and pain central to the human experience that carry into the present. As a result, “America has ended up with a landscape of denial,” 12 punctuated by memorials that ignore the indignities and struggles of many, including African Americans, labor organizers, and women. Monuments and memorials that affirm power and reinforce social hierarchies, as many do, inhibit our shared ability to acknowledge and remember truths that could lead to deeper understanding, greater acceptance, and better relationships in our pluralistic society. The Greensboro Massacre is one case in which a history is contested by competing discourses. For the City of Greensboro, radical outsiders incited the events of November 3, 1979, but for the victims it was a continuing struggle by the people to connect civil liberties, labor rights, and civil rights in a country where the promise of justice for all had yet to be realized. Admittedly, the sit-ins of 1960 in Greensboro that preceded the Greensboro Massacre sparked a national sea change to integrate lunch counters. However, the years that followed left most of the social life and racial disparities in the city untouched. The Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission reported, “The black community felt not much had changed by 1980.” 13 In 1979, there was severe racial inequality in work environments, educational systems, and health conditions recognized by blacks as exploitation that existed side-by-side with mistreatment in the judicial system to which they were herded.

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The textile mills in Greensboro at that time were powerful, influential companies that perpetuated these disparities with poor factory conditions and low wages for black workers. 14 The dangerous working environment, substandard pay, and racial segregation led some civil rights activists from around the state to leave their professions in order to work at the mills and help organize labor unions to more forcefully combat the exploitation. 15 The young, multiracial alliance protested to bring public attention to the plight of the working class. Sally Bermanzohn, a survivor of the Greensboro Massacre, writes, “We were black and white radical activists who had deep roots in the civil rights, Black Power, antiwar, and women’s liberation movements.” 16 They aligned themselves under the structure of the Workers Viewpoint Organization (WVO), later named the Communist Workers Party (CWP). In opposition to the movement toward unionization, the textile mill owners allowed the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) to distribute their white supremacist literature on mill property. The WVO/CWP reasoned that they had to first confront the influence of the Klan to evoke real change within the textile mills. Jovanovic explains, “The Communists believed that the lingering racism that the KKK promoted and the extreme class stratification that marked the South were both intolerable conditions caused and sustained by the capitalist domination of the masses.” 17 In late 1979, the WVO/CWP planned a well-publicized march against the Klan in Greensboro. The KKK and Nazis joined together to attend the march with revenge in mind, stemming from a Klan-WVO/CWP confrontation in nearby China Grove, North Carolina, earlier that summer. While the Klan and Nazis were meeting with plans to settle the score as they saw it, the Greensboro Police Department and federal agencies took note via their informants and provocateurs. The police were thus apprised of plans for violence, yet no preemptive action was taken to protect the protesters on November 3. The WVO/CWP rally on November 3, 1979, was held in the low-income public house project of Morningside Homes where a crowd of forty to fifty protesters waved picket signs and chanted “Death to the Klan.” At approximately 11:20 am, a caravan of nine cars drove up slowly to the march with police informant Eddie Dawson in the first car. 18 “The cars were filled with thirty-seven Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi Party members, many holding shotguns in their laps.” 19 The Klan and Nazis yelled racial epithets out of their windows, as the protesters began hitting and kicking the cars. Greensboro police detective Cooper was following behind the caravan in an unmarked tenth car and in plainclothes. He radioed his fellow officers to let them know that the caravan was at the march but without uniformed police already on the scene, violence erupted. 20 A Klansman fired the first shot and then thirty-eight more followed. Within eighty-eight seconds, five protesters were slain and ten more were

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wounded. People were screaming for help as the Klan/Nazi caravan sped away. “Four died instantly: César Cauce, Dr. James Waller, Sandra Smith, and Bill Sampson. A fifth, Dr. Michael Nathan, survived two more days in a local hospital before he too died.” 21 Only after the massacre did the police arrive on the scene. The final vehicle of the Klan/Nazi caravan was eventually stopped, and “The officers arrested twelve Klansmen and Nazis who had in their possession four shotguns, a bloodied hunting knife, three revolvers, two sets of brass knuckles, a five-foot length of chain, and ammunition.” 22 Camera crews from four local news stations recorded the events of that day on film. Most people in Greensboro and around the world who saw the television footage of the carnage believed that the Klan and Nazis would be convicted of murder in a court of law, but in two criminal trials, they were found not guilty of any crime. 23 After failing to get even a single conviction in the criminal trials, the protesters sought justice in a civil trial. Five years later, a small measure of justice was meted out. Detective Cooper, Klan informant Eddie Dawson, a police lieutenant, three Klansmen, and two Nazis were found liable for conspiracy to commit assault and battery, which led to the death of Dr. Michael Nathan. 24 The City of Greensboro paid $351,000 to Nathan’s estate but “despite the judgment, the police did not admit wrongdoing.” 25 Even 35 years later, only a watered down statement of regret was offered by the City of Greensboro as a response to the two years of investigative work, public hearings, and public outcry surrounding the work of the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission. 26 Survivor Sally Bermanzohn watched as her husband was shot in the head and arm, and left permanently paralyzed from the massacre. She contends that the protestors were virtually defenseless that day yet, “The powers that be continued to blame us, the victims, for the deaths of our friends. They scapegoated us as communists, as if we were despicable and subhuman.” 27 Immediately following the massacre, city officials deflected attention away from their role, repeating that the fight was one between outside groups, and not community members of Greensboro. But, the story remained unsettled until years later when the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission engaged the community in a two-year process to more fully examine the context, causes, sequence and consequence of the events of November 3. The Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission issued its final report, concluding: (1) The police department had knowledge of the Klan and Nazi’s violent plans; (2) The City of Greensboro responded inadequately; and (3) That both criminal trials were rife with injustice. 28 The Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s recommendations covered broad categories to effect reconciliation, initiate institutional reforms, change police and judicial practices, and encourage greater citizen engagement in com-

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munity matters. Among those sweeping recommendations was a specific call to establish a public monument on the site to honor those killed and wounded. The highway historical marker’s placement was sought with that recommendation in mind. DISCURSIVE UNDERSTANDING THROUGH PHENOMENOLOGICAL INQUIRY In examining the struggle over the naming of the highway marker, we accepted the value of phenomenological inquiry and ethnographic research methods to see, hear, and feel the arguments that highlighted the community’s continuing struggle with its identity and history. We attended city council meetings, community gatherings, and the actual marker installation event. 29 We interviewed community members, city staffers, advisory committee members, and a journalist. We closely read and analyzed the local media reports, examined the public’s responses, and researched our city’s history. Our physical presence at numerous events provided us the opportunity to see the passion, hear the hopes, and feel the energy that emanated from the stories of the survivors of the Greensboro Massacre and their supporters. We listened to their words and applauded their voices. This approach allowed for an exploration of the historical context from the point of view of those who lived through past events, and to better understand how the experiences of blacks and labor activists were related to the larger civil rights movement. Using ethnographic methods as well as a critical lens in our analysis offered the opportunity for a potentially deeper understanding of a complex topic. According to Lindlof and Taylor, critical ethnography researchers “are committed to using ethnographic methods to responsibly engage the life worlds inhabited by disenfranchised, forgotten, and demonized groups.” 30 In line with that approach, we immersed ourselves in the community to observe and participate in the organizing efforts for the historical marker. As participant observers, we collected information (field notes) and exercised the “craft of experiencing and recording events in social settings.” 31 We were able to forge relationships with the survivors and community members by being present as scholar activists committed to the tenets of social justice. As communication activists, we sought to highlight our community members’ struggle to “reconstruct unjust discourses in more just ways.” 32 Central to that work was collaborating fully with community members. Anderson notes that collaboration among scholar activists and community members is dynamic, “taking into account their interests and goals as well their insights and knowledge.” 33 Thus, in addition to the research conducted to write about this community struggle, we also discussed the Greensboro Mas-

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sacre marker with college and high school classes to increase awareness of the grassroots efforts being waged in their city. REMEMBERING A CONTESTED NARRATIVE North Carolina’s highway markers are limited to twenty-five words. 34 In this case, the marker was proposed to read, “GREENSBORO MASSACRE—Ku Klux Klan members and American Nazis, on Nov. 3, 1979, shot and killed five Communist Workers Party members one-tenth mile north.” The advisory committee unanimously approved the installation of the historical marker and the brief description of the Greensboro Massacre to be inscribed on the sign. However, the announcement of that approval, much to the surprise of the program’s director and the advisory committee’s ten historians was met with unprecedented resistance by a contingent of white community leaders on Greensboro’s City Council. 35 They claimed the word massacre on a state highway marker would hurt Greensboro’s image and its ability to attract future business. One city council man, a local attorney, said: Other midsize cities are concentrating on the positive, marketing the positive, attracting jobs and businesses. We continue to discuss what happened when gas was 28 cents per gallon. That’s what holds Greensboro back—a small group of people who make an industry of racism and unhappiness, marketing all that’s unpleasant and negative no matter how long ago these things occurred. 36

The city council members opposed to the marker’s wording had company. In an online poll in the local newspaper, of the 550 respondents, 41 percent did not support the marker installation with the word “massacre” as its title. Six letters to the editor in the newspaper were uniformly opposed to the installation of the marker and its proposed wording. The authors objected to glorifying the work of “the communists” in any way, expressing a view that on November 3, 1979, the protestors brought on the violence that ensued. That position reflected the narrative originally constructed by the city’s elite to deflect attention away from the police’s prior knowledge of impending violence. Rhetorically, the letter writers’ words reflected entitled and confident messages that they were unafraid to share openly because their views had already been inscribed in the dominant narrative. Denigrating the survivors as they did conveyed hegemonic control of that narrative and the difficulties that minority populations face when speaking up for social change. At the same time, community activists asserted that the time had come to recognize Greensboro’s past thoughtfully and truthfully, and to change an illinformed narrative to more adequately reflect the experiences of the survi-

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vors. Patricia Priest, chairwoman of the Beloved Community Center, wrote in her letter to the mayor of Greensboro: We strongly support the initial wording on the proposed marker put forth by the North Carolina Highway Historical Marker Advisory Committee. We do not believe that local politics should override the considered work of qualified historians. We ask you as our elected leaders not to bow to the pressures of the moment. 37

Priest’s comments were echoed by people at meetings and protests organized around the city in the weeks that followed, and endorsed by most (58 percent) of the respondents in the local newspaper’s poll. The youngest city councilman, who knew of November 3 only from what he had read or learned in school, said, “What happened in 1979 happened, it’s a part of our history. We need to acknowledge it. But we also have to move Greensboro forward and stop arguing and bickering about it.” 38 The controversy was featured in the city’s daily newspaper in dozens of news articles, opinion pieces, and letters to the editor, reflecting the fierce community outcry. Debates over remembering the past bring forward differing ideologies both by those resisting any changes to the existing narrative and by those advancing what they consider much needed changes. Alderman recounts an attempt to establish a marker elsewhere in the state, in New Bern, North Carolina, regarding a “major early twentieth century fire that impacted the African American population” about which he writes, “The marker application was unsuccessful, shedding light on the obstacles that face efforts to rewrite, literally and politically, landscapes of public memory.” 39 Traditionally marginalized groups all over our country face similar obstacles in having their histories remembered and represented accurately. COMMUNITY CONVERSATIONS AND ORGANIZING The effort to secure the Greensboro Massacre historical marker gained new allies as the community organizing efforts grew to create conversational spaces around the city. Two public information sessions were organized and a number of other protest actions were planned as a direct response to the city council’s initial work session when they first discussed their views on the marker’s wording. The application for the marker was submitted by Lewis Brandon in October 2014. The marker’s authorizing agency provided written approval in December 2014. At the January 15, 2015, work session, two white male Republican council members said in no uncertain terms that they strongly opposed the marker and its wording. They faced off against two black female Democrat council members who had written letters of support to accompany

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the application for the marker. Another white female council member said that day that she supported the marker’s wording and placement. The race, gender, and partisan lines had been drawn. Three remaining city council members (two white, one black) and the (white) mayor did not commit to a position. Following that council’s work session, the survivors and their supporters organized their public information campaign to mobilize the community. As scholar-activists, we joined the campaign by editing the documents to be used in the information sessions. At multiple two-hour long meetings, more than one hundred people discussed the controversy, most united to keep the word massacre on the marker. They were animated by a thirst for justice, though different perspectives emerged regarding advocacy tactics (“let’s protest,” “don’t make it too big an issue” and “this is a bigger concern than just the marker”). The meetings, however divergent the views, accepted all positions and relayed the overarching message that people should attend the February 3 city council meeting where the final vote was to take place. One of the most vocal groups to step forward with the survivors was the then newly formed Black Lives Matter contingent. Young men and women from this movement attended the community meetings, organized protest action of their own, and then spoke at the February city council meeting in support of including the word massacre on the marker. Some of the young activists were students from the nearby historically black North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. They spoke with intensity, yet remained calm even as one councilman attempted to silence them. Three young people read from a prepared statement, sectioned off in two-minute increments as allotted for public comment. A young man started off with his plea to keep the word massacre on the marker, for he said, it bore the truth of what happened that day. He said, “The death of these good people was not a result of a shoot-out. . . . It was a massacre. Set the record straight . . . black lives matter, black communities matter, black history matters.” 40 Other speakers from the group showed photographs from November 3, including the victims to give the five dead a place in history other than being portrayed simply as communists and evil deserving of their tragic fate. Desiree, a young black woman said of the five who died, “their humanity was stolen from them” 41 in the intervening years. The young activists showed photographs as well of the police who arrived after the violence, and the large amount of weapons and artillery used by the Klan and Nazis. These activists, who were not yet born when the massacre occurred, were prepared, organized, and ready to act in concert with the many older community members involved in the struggle. One elder, in particular, put the project in perspective for them to encourage their passion when he said at an earlier community meeting, “We, the people in a democracy, have to push forward and insist that the truth be let out.” 42 He reminded the young people that to

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install a marker without the word massacre on it was tantamount to massacring the truth. Another less vocal, though critically important associated group in the effort, was the Greensboro Historical Museum. The museum had offered a very small Greensboro Massacre display only since 2010 as part of a larger “Voices of the City” exhibit. According to the museum’s director, a newer, interactive component was added during the marker debate to recognize the value of community conversations on the subject. She said, “It’s important. We need to recognize the discussion about what makes history and who makes history.” 43 She added that the Greensboro Historical Museum was eager to host a symposium, conference, lecture series or other event to coincide with the Greensboro Massacre’s fortieth anniversary in 2019. In all, eighteen people spoke out at the city council meeting in support of the marker including the word massacre. Their comments and the discussion that followed lasted one to one and a half hours. Throughout, nearly two hundred people were in attendance to clap and cheer for the speakers from the floor. When the vote was finally taken, the two white male council members who strongly opposed the marker from the beginning were the only ones to vote against the wording, Greensboro Massacre. With the 7–2 vote of support, the marker’s installation was assured. MARKERS AS RHETORICAL ARTIFACTS Memorials and markers narrate the past through words and textual references. 44 “It faces us with our own history for the purpose of change and efforts to avoid repeating the past.” 45 The choices we make, then, about how events are memorialized become rhetorical artifacts that have far more reach than a simple statement of historical record. “Monumental ‘memory works’ are being undertaken in towns and cities whose names are synonymous with the struggle against white supremacy.” 46 Greensboro is one of those cities that lays claim to such memory works because of its rich civil rights history and the monuments and museums that memorialize them, including the site of 1960 Greensboro Sit-ins organized by students from NC A&T University at the Woolworth’s lunch counter that is now the site of the International Civil Rights Center and Museum. For a community like Greensboro, denying or ignoring a major event that so greatly impacted the racial and economic landscape of the area perhaps speaks as much to the current state of (in) equality than to the event that occurred in 1979. Blair and Michel point out that where politics as usual may not achieve desired changes in society, visual/material rhetoric can. 47 They cite instances from the civil rights movement that led to needed changes in attitudes and perspectives. Seen this way, a highway marker is more than a

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sign, it is a place of remembrance, and also a space to acknowledge wrongs and initiate dialogues about the events that impacted the past and shape the present and future. The inclusion of the word massacre on Greensboro’s historical marker was seen by the community activists as a way to deconstruct the myths perpetuated about November 3 and to uncover hidden power dynamics that sought to deny the truth. The word massacre was thus a gateway to reconstructing a city where the voices of all members of the community could be included in determining its collective identity and values. A historical marker can reconnect a community with its past, especially when the geographic landscape has physically changed, leaving the ground upon which history occurred empty of its original context. “Sometimes the historical marker becomes more important than the site itself. If the place has changed, the plaque offers something to see, a way to connect with this event.” 48 For Greensboro, the location of the marker’s installation was all the more critical since the original intersection where the massacre occurred had been redeveloped. We know that understanding the past is dependent upon the narratives constructed from the memories that are passed on from one generation to the next. Historical markers codify those stories. However, as Kristin Lavelle points out, memories are not simply artifacts of the past, but also ongoing processes of viewing the past. 49 How we represent history, then, is what is at stake in the local initiatives to launch their bids for markers. With respect to race and its impact on society, Lavelle found in interviews with forty-four elder white Southerners living in Greensboro that there is a tendency to whitewash the past; her interviewees expressed dismay, frustration, and outright hostility at “the idea of truth-telling when they believed it had to do with the tumultuous racial past,” equating talk about such a past as “beating a dead horse” or staying “in the stew.” 50 Thus, it was disappointing, but no surprise when a Greensboro councilman during the marker debates said, “I think if the wording was changed to ‘shootout’ or ‘shooting’ it would be closer to what actually happened” and was reported in the local newspaper. 51 To remember the Greensboro Massacre means to acknowledge the deeds of those who knew about the planned violence that resulted in the deaths and injuries to protestors, implicating in ways, a police force and the city’s governance, and maybe even the broader culture where such violence unfolded. Such uncomfortable truths and wrongdoings are ones some would rather erase from our collective memory in favor of memorializing success where it can be found. Florini writes that when it comes to race, that process is similarly bound to leaders invested in upholding their authority: Because it is generally the powerful in a society who make the choices about what is remembered and what is forgotten, the dominant U.S. history has

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largely been constructed in ways that leave the mechanisms of racial oppression intact, ensuring their continuation while asserting their disappearance. 52

Indeed, the research is consistent in recognizing that while most people believe remembering the past is important, those who might be portrayed unflatteringly express discomfort in or outright opposition to talking publicly about that, opting instead to protect, pardon, or rationalize persistent racial inequalities. 53 TELLING THE TRUTH, WORDS AND POWER How would November 3 be remembered with a highway marker? Choosing to refer to the event as a clash or shoot-out situated the survivors as at fault, a move many regarded as one more attempt to hide, mask or even massacre the truth. For the activists, it was critical to have the word massacre included on the marker as an opportunity to reclaim the truth. Survivor Nelson Johnson saw the installation of the Greensboro Massacre marker also as a rallying cry for better community. He explained, “We’ve had so much thrown at us in Greensboro. We now have a moment to all stand together and to compel the leadership of the city to accept its own history so that the bleakness of yesterday can be transformed into the beauty of tomorrow.” 54 Michel Foucault might attribute the inability of Greensboro to agree about the truth surrounding November 3 as the “insurrection of subjugated knowledges,” that knowledge that has been “buried or disguised in a . . . formal systemisation” relegating it at best to the margins of consideration and at worst judging it unnecessary altogether. 55 Community members found, as Foucault recognizes, that truth is most often produced under the influence of dominating forces, such as political leaders and the media, who have the power to name historical events. Thus, disrupting that power was key to ensuring the word massacre was included in the historical record as engraved on the highway marker. At stake was, as Scott Welsh says, the word: “To the extent that words matter, democracy is a contest for power mediated by rhetoric.” 56 Drawing again from Foucault who famously contends that we cannot separate truth from power, the community effort was aimed at liberating the long-established truth from the hegemony that had for more than thirty years deemed local forms of knowledge inadequate, inaccurate, and unworthy of recognition. Survivors and their supporters relied on organizing their allies who together with them they reasoned, could influence social change. Collectively, their mission was to influence those members of the city council and the community who held tight to the belief that the events of November 3 ought rightly to be considered a shoot-out between extremist groups. The work of the survivors and their supporters was to have their subjugated

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knowledge of November 3 finally recognized as a massacre, and to be memorialized as such on the highway marker. The battle was one “over the words and names that constitute public memory” with broader implications for democratic politics. 57 The multiplicity of voices that came together to interrupt and disrupt the dominant narrative was profound. That intervention was democracy, not a tool for democracy or a democratic pedagogy; it was democracy. 58 As noted by Apple, Au, and Gandin, activist teachers can be an asset to the community in these struggles when they “see the world through the eyes of the dispossessed and act against ideological and institutional processes and forms that reproduce oppressive conditions.” 59 We worked in ways intentionally designed to follow the lead of our community members who pushed to make Greensboro a reflexive city that could draw on its painful past, rather than ignore it, to make its present more socially just for all. ACKNOWLEDGING THE TRUTH AS A CELEBRATION FOR DEMOCRACY On the afternoon of May 24, 2015, the Greensboro Massacre historical marker was finally unveiled after a dedication ceremony held at a local African American church. The hour-long ceremony was both powerful and inspiring, as survivors and family members of the victims of the massacre spoke in front of more than three hundred people. In attendance were people reflecting different races, ages, and cultural backgrounds. Elders surrounded young people and whites and blacks stood side by side. Reverend Nelson Johnson, once a youthful organizer and survivor of November 3 and now a seventytwo-year-old minister said, “I’ve asked several young people to stand with me because we should never stand alone. And what we do today is for them.” Dignitaries, too, turned out, among them Yvonne Johnson, city councilwoman and mayor pro-tem who said, “The marker we’re going to dedicate today will mark what truly happened that day—a massacre. And then, healing can begin.” Alma Adams, representing the 12th Congressional District in the US House of Representatives said, “Five people were senselessly killed . . . in that massacre. History is not always celebratory, but history must be recorded and put in its proper place. This dedication represents that opportunity.” One after another, more than a dozen speakers took to the podium met by a crowd that cheered, some with tears flowing from their eyes. When the speaking, singing, and holding hands in both joy and sorrow drew to an end inside the church, the crowd made its way one-half mile away to where the highway marker was to be installed. This march was in some ways the same, and in other ways so different than that of the one on November 3. The crowd walked through a predominantly black neighborhood, cars

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slowed down, and people stood on their front porches to witness the procession. That brought back memories of November 3 for some. But, this time, it was different, too. There were no Klan members. There was no hate. This time, police escorted the crowd on their bicycles as everyone exuded happiness and pride on the walk to Willow and McConnell Roads. Terrence Muhammad, an activist with the Beloved Community Center, Hip Hop Caucus, and other groups, was the first to speak at the installation site: We cannot have reconciliation without having the truth. The marker says the truth. We want justice today. We cannot have justice without the truth. It’s history we have to recognize so we don’t have to live it again . . . we have to change our hearts, we have to reconcile.

Clergy members of different faiths followed, including retired Bishop Chip Marble who proclaimed, “It is sacred soil already. The blood has been poured in this place. I am proud to be walking with such [grassroots] leadership that we have in Greensboro.” Finally, the survivors and family members invited residents of Morningside Homes, where the Greensboro Massacre occurred, to join with them in removing the sheath from the marker as survivor Joyce Hobson Johnson proclaimed “history for all of the people” to acknowledge an episode that forever changed their lives. Recognition and acknowledgment of the massacre of November 3 is an ongoing theme in the reflections of victims and community members. The deep significance for survivors and community members of the marker’s use of the word massacre is consistent with how rhetorician Michael Hyde considers the power of acknowledgment as an ontological process to build dwelling places of community where we may authentically know together some shared truth, history, or experience. For Hyde, the marker’s use of the term massacre is a “preliminary step in this process of attuning one’s consciousness toward another,” 60 thus allowing the community to move toward more connected forms of knowing. The moral function of rhetoric, as an act of acknowledgment, motivated the survivors of November 3 in their tireless pursuit of the truth for more than thirty years. They pursued acknowledgment as an ethical, hopeful discourse, one that could transform spaces to create openings for people to dwell, deliberate and consider the right, good and just. 61 As Michael Hyde reminds us, acknowledgment is a “life-giving gift” that is crucial for what it means to live together in peace. CONCLUSION The tragic story of five people killed and ten more injured contains tantalizing details of the Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi Party colluding with

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federal agents and local law enforcement. It is a story as well of labor struggles in a town where segregation was the preferred mode of daily operations, and where black Americans lost economic, health, and educational ground, year by year. Thus, when the proposed marker was brought to the attention of the city council thirty-five years after the event itself, a difficult struggle ensued—once again—to reach for an understanding of the significance of November 3, 1979. Through the lens of one city’s attempt to tell the unvarnished truth of its past and recent high-profile racial killings too, we highlighted the tensions surrounding our country’s civil rights history. Communities everywhere face similar struggles as they seek to likewise reconcile painful historical events in favor of upholding the justice they consider more honest and truthful. The idea that the word has power was at the epicenter of this debate over the marker. Telling the truth was at stake. Was massacre the right word to use? Greensboro’s News and Record reporter covering the controversy responded by saying, “That’s what it is locally known as, that is what people call it.” 62 A member of the North Carolina Highway Historical Marker Advisory Committee echoed that sentiment, saying, “I do not recall any extended discussion [in our meetings] about the specific wording Greensboro Massacre. This term is very popular . . . not meaning well liked, but meaning the numbers of people who recognize the event by this title.” 63 Historical markers pronounce not only what happened in a place, but also who committed the acts, which is why many markers are missing from our landscapes. Loewen writes, “In most places Americans have not shown the moral courage to tell what really happened there, let alone offer a hint of apology or rectification.” 64 One of North Carolina’s state senators affirmed that in Greensboro the community’s courage had been at last voiced loudly enough to pronounce, “Struggles and failures continue today. We need to mark that event and we need to work for equal rights and quality of life for all.” 65 Ascertaining the proper content of public history inevitably involves struggle, responsive to new information once buried, and reflective of the compassion and truth perhaps not always known. Loewen’s extensive review of historical sites sheds light on the challenge for our country: Americans share a common history that unites us. But we also share some more difficult events—a common history that divides us. These things too we must remember, for only then can we understand our divisions and work to reduce them. 66

That is, a just society is always in the making. It is not static, but instead a way of being and thinking.

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Democracy is likewise not a status quo, or a political regime that once established is eternally immutable. These facts presented themselves in Greensboro, centered on the word massacre, as the system worked to restrain disrupting voices in favor of maintaining the dominant narratives. Activist interruptions as democratic action challenged the city’s elected leaders and community members to discuss and deliberate over the right and just course of action. In that light, the goal of the disruptions in the struggle to include the word massacre on the highway marker also worked to educate citizens as mindful, soulful, and embodied members of their democracy. The victory was not against the opponents of the word massacre; it was a victory for truth and democratic participation. That message, as important as it is to the local community, provides hope as well to communities across the country that are suffering from episodes of racist violence and the role of the police in it. Hessel and Morin write that “individual change and social change are inseparable; taken alone, each is inadequate.” 67 Reverend Nelson Johnson tapped into the same spirit when he called the members of the Ku Klux Klan and members of the Nazi party his “brothers.” 68 The goal for him, he said, has always been justice and healing for the community, inspired by love and anchored by truth. The interventions led by all the activists to get the marker for the Greensboro Massacre were further acts for love and truth. The community members worked to unveil hegemony and its dire consequences on the city. By encouraging dialogue and mobilizing the community to peacefully disrupt the dominant narrative to allow the word massacre reflect the truth in Greensboro’s history, they won a victory for justice and truth everywhere. REFERENCES Alderman, Derek. “‘History by the Spoonful’ in North Carolina: The Textual Politics of State Highway Historical Markers.” Southeastern Geographer 52, no. 4 (2012): 355–73. doi:10.1353/sgo.2012.0035. Anderson, James. “Engaged Learning, Engaged Scholarship: A Struggle for the Soul of Higher Education.” Northwest Journal of Communication 42, no. 1 (2014): 143–66. http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/95028269/engaged-learning-engaged-scholarship-strugglesoul-higher-education. Bermanzohn, Sally A. “A Massacre Survivor Reflects on the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” Radical History Review 97 (Winter 2007): 102–9. doi:10.1215/ 01636545-2006-015. Blair, Carole, and Neil Michel. “Reproducing Civil Rights Tactics: The Rhetorical Performances of the Civil Rights Memorial.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 30, no. 2 (2000): 31–55. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3886159. City of Greensboro. “City Council on 2015-02-03.” Video of city council meeting, 4:11:00. Filmed February 3, 2015. http://greensboro.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?view_id=2& clip_id=2276. Cose, Ellis. “How to Mend a Massacre.” Newsweek, June 1, 2003. http://www.newsweek.com / how-mend-massacre-137869.

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Dwyer, Owen J. 2000. “Interpreting the Civil Rights Movement: Place, Memory, and Conflict.” The Professional Geographer 52, no. 4 (2000): 660–71. doi:10.1111/00330124.00255. Florini, Sarah. “Recontextualizing the Racial Present: Intertextuality and the Politics of Online Remembering.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 31 no. 4 (2014): 314–26. doi:10.1080/15295036.2013.878028. Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. Edited by Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. Frey, Lawrence R., and David L. Palmer. Teaching Communication Activism: Communication Education for Social Justice. New York: Hampton Press, 2014. Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth. Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950. New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 2008. Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission. “Final Report.” Released May 25, 2006. http://www.greensborotrc.org/. Hessel, Stephane, and Edgar Morin. The Path to Hope. New York: Other Press, 2012. Hyde, Michael, J. The Life-Giving Gift of Acknowledgment. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006. Jovanovic, Spoma. Democracy, Dialogue, and Community Action: Truth and Reconciliation in Greensboro. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2012. Jovanovic, Spoma, and Sarah E. Hollingsworth. “An Ethical Imperative: The Pursuit of Truth, Forgiveness and Reconciliation in Greensboro.” In Crimes Against Humanity in the Land of the Free: Can Truth and Reconciliation Heal America’s Racial Divide?, edited by Imani M. Scott, 171–93. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2014. Killian, Joe. “Beloved Center: Keep ‘Massacre.’” News and Record. January 22, 2015. http:// www.greensboro.com/news/beloved-center-keep-massacre/article_4f1c1000-a8d7-11e48caf-f35fb4b5c21d.html. ———. “Compromise May Save History.” News and Record. January 22, 2015. http:// www.greensboro.com/news/government/compromise-may-save-history/article_e58e5f76a1bf-11e4-94c4-f70081bbdf1b.html. ———. “Nov. 3, 1979: A Day that Still Divides City,” News and Record. January 25, 2015. http://www.news-record.com/news/nov-a-day-that-still-divides-city/article_729b27d0a316-11e4-9db0-4f4dd8dd7f09.html. Kops, Jason. “The Greensboro Massacre: A Challenge to Accepted Historical Interpretations.” Explorations 7 (2012): 76–86. http://uncw.edu/csurf/Explorations/documents/JasonKops.pdf. Lavelle, Kristen M. Whitewashing the South: White Memories of Segregation and Civil Rights. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015. Lindlof, Thomas R., and Bryan C. Taylor. Qualitative Communication Research Methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2011. Loewen, James W. Lies across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong. New York: Touchstone, 1999. Lopez, Robert. “‘Greensboro Massacre’ Marker Unveiling Set for Today,” News and Record, May 23, 2015. http://www.greensboro.com/news/local_news/greensboro-massacre-markerunveiling-set-for-today/article_d1bf737a-00e9-11e5-b0de-978243a1f875.html. Magarrell, Lisa, and Joya Wesley. Learning from Greensboro: Truth and Reconciliation in the United States. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources. “North Carolina Highway Historical Marker Program: Notification.” Last modified 2008. http://www.ncmarkers.com/notification .aspx. Sykes, Jeff, “Greensboro Leaders Clash Over Marker for 1979 Klan–Nazi Shootout,” Yes! Weekly. January 16, 2015. http://yesweekly.com/article-19320-greensboro-leaders-clashover-marker-for-1979-klan-nazi-shootout.html. Welsh, Scott. The Rhetorical Surface of Democracy: How deliberative Ideals Undermine Democratic Politics. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013. Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States: 1492–Present. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.

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NOTES 1. Jovanovic, Democracy. 2. Karen, speaking at a public information meeting hosted by Beloved Community Center at Bethel AME Church in Greensboro, NC, February 2, 2015. 3. Kops, “The Greensboro Massacre,” 76. 4. Sykes, “Greensboro Leaders Clash Over Marker for 1979 Klan–Nazi Shootout,” para. 33. 5. Zinn, A People’s History of the United States. 6. Alderman, “‘History by the Spoonful’ in North Carolina.” 7. Gilmore, Defying Dixie, 3. 8. Jovanovic, Democracy, 8. 9. Cose, “How to Mend a Massacre.” 10. Magarrell and Wesley, Learning from Greensboro. 11. For one example of the awards bestowed to Rev. Nelson Johnson and Joyce Johnson, see http://encore.org/purpose-prize/nelson-johnson. 12. Loewen, Lies across America, 19. 13. Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission, “Final Report,” 40. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Bermanzohn, “A Massacre Survivor Reflects,” 102. 17. Jovanovic, Democracy, 3. 18. Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission, “Final Report.” 19. Jovanovic, Democracy, 5. 20. Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission, “Final Report.” 21. Jovanovic, Democracy, 5. 22. Ibid., 6. 23. Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission, “Final Report.” 24. Jovanovic, Democracy. 25. Ibid., 15. 26. Jovanovic and Hollingsworth, “An Ethical Imperative,” 104. 27. Bermanzohn, “A Massacre Survivor Reflects on the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission,”104. 28. Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission, “Final Report.” 29. We are grateful to the valuable contributions of Monti Beasley, who also attended community meetings, conducted interviews, and shared her notes with us for this chapter. 30. Lindlof and Taylor, Qualitative Communication Research Methods, 57. 31. Ibid., 135. 32. Frey and Palmer, Teaching Communication Activism, 8. 33. Anderson, “Engaged Learning, Engaged Scholarship,” 145. 34. North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, “North Carolina Highway Historical Marker Program.” North Carolina’s highway historical markers are administered through the Office of Archives and History and the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources; the Traffic Engineering Branch Division of Highways, Department of Transportation shares responsibility. The process to secure a marker involves submitting an application to the Highway Historical Marker Advisory Committee comprised of ten historians from colleges and universities who are experts in one or more aspects of the state’s history. The committee members appointed by the Secretary of the Department of Cultural Resources serve five-year terms to determine the merit, authenticity, and appropriateness of the proposed markers. The committee also determines the wording of the inscriptions not to exceed twenty-five words so that it can be read by a passing car. 35. See Lopez, “‘Greensboro Massacre’ Marker Unveiling Set for Today.” Of North Carolina’s nearly 1,600 highway markers, none were the subject of more contention than the Greensboro Massacre, according to program director Michael Hill. 36. Killian, “Compromise May Save History,” para. 19. 37. Killian, “Beloved Center: Keep ‘Massacre,’” para. 5.

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38. Killian, “Nov. 3, 1979: A Day that Still Divides City,” para. 87. 39. Alderman, “‘History by the Spoonful’ in North Carolina,” 355. 40. City of Greensboro, “City Council on 2015-02-03.” Irving Allen, followed by Desiree Mebane and Thessa Pickett, addressed the Greensboro City Council on February 2, 2015, 1:54:06–1:54:36. 41. Ibid., 1:57:30 42. Lewis Pitts, speaking at the public information session at Bethel AME Church on Monday, February 2, 2015. 43. Jeanette Musselwhite, speaking by phone to museum director Carol Hart, March 27, 2015. 44. Alderman, “‘History by the Spoonful’ in North Carolina.” 45. Blair and Michel, “Reproducing Civil Rights Tactics,” 48. 46. Dwyer, “Interpreting the Civil Rights Movement,” 660. 47. Ibid. 48. Loewen, Lies across America, 13. 49. Lavelle, Whitewashing the South. 50. Ibid., 176–77. 51. Killian, “Compromise May Save History,” para. 6. 52. Florini, “Recontextualizing the Racial Present,” 316. 53. Lavelle, Whitewashing the South. 54. Reverend Nelson Johnson, speaking at a regular Wednesday Community Table discussion at Beloved Community Center on January 28, 2015. 55. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 81. 56. Welsh, The Rhetorical Surface of Democracy, 11. 57. Ibid., 93. 58. Ibid. 59. Cited in Frey and Palmer, Teaching Communication Activism, 46. 60. Hyde, The Life-Giving Gift of Acknowledgment, 3. 61. Ibid. 62. Kelly O’Donnell, speaking in person with Joe Killian at a local coffee shop on February 7, 2015. 63. Monti Beasley, speaking in person with Dr. Lisa Tolbert in Tolbert’s office on March 6, 2015. 64. Loewen, Lies across America, 417. 65. North Carolina State Senator Gladys Robinson’s comments at the installation of the marker on May 24, 2015. 66. Loewen, Lies across America, 8. 67. Hessel and Morin, The Path to Hope, 62. 68. Reverend Nelson Johnson, speaking at the Greensboro City Council meeting on February 3, 2015.

Chapter Four

The Tragic Action and Revolutionary Intent of Black Lives The Historical Genealogies and Corporeal Dynamics of Cornel West’s Prophetic Pragmatism in Post-Racial America Paul R. D. Lawrie

In the early afternoon drizzle of October 13, 2014, a crowd of some six hundred people marched to the police department headquarters in downtown Ferguson, Missouri, to protest police brutality against the city’s black communities. Weeks earlier this small suburban community outside St. Louis was thrust into the international spotlight following the shooting death of an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, at the hands of Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. 1 Brown’s death—and the authorities mishandling of the subsequent investigation—seemed for many to be only the latest episode in a centuries’ long pattern of judicial and extrajudicial destruction of black bodies. Two years prior in Florida the shooting death of Trayvon Martin by local neighborhood watch coordinator George Zimmerman helped launch the #BlackLivesMatter movement which took a leading role in the subsequent Ferguson protests. Weaned on the platitudes of “post-racialism,” these young social media savvy activists denounced the persistence of deep socioeconomic, judicial, and political forms of racial inequality that conspired to leave Michael Brown to die on the desolate streets of Ferguson. The architects of the #BlackLivesMatter movement drew deeply upon past practices of the civil rights struggle; specifically public displays of the black body from lunch counter sit-ins to mass marches. The mere presence of black bodies in

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these contexts evinced the inviolable nature of black humanity linking disparate forms of social protest across space and time. Amidst the marchers in Ferguson that sodden October afternoon was Dr. Cornel West, a titan of the African American intelligentsia and one of the nation’s leading public intellectuals. Linking arms with his fellow marchers in the face of a cordon of police officials he spoke of the need to “bear witness . . . to put our bodies on the line so that justice can roll down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.” 2 West’s evocation of the corporeal (“bodies on the line”) and transitive (“to bear witness”) nature of protest couched in the cadences of the black church bespoke his philosophy of prophetic pragmatism developed over decades of scholarship and activism. For West prophetic pragmatism was both a critique of structural racial inequalities and a prophetic attempt to create a model of “tragic action with revolutionary intent” whereby the black body became both a repository and agent of social change. 3 For West the corporeal dynamics of bearing witness was a fundamentally public act inextricably tied to the politics of the body. But given black bodies’ historically fraught role within the cultures of American capitalism—whether as commodities on the slave block to victims of police brutality—said politics were rife with contradictions. Activists in Ferguson and beyond struggled to develop a praxis of protest that balanced real and metaphorical black bodies’ vast emancipatory potential with the corporeal constraints of being black in America. While the youthful visages of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown served as stark indictments of the murderous, tragic extremes of racial inequality their very blackness denoted an oft-presumed deviance that led to their destruction in the first place. This chapter examines the historical genealogies and corporeal dynamics of Cornel West’s philosophy of prophetic pragmatism. More specifically the following charts the history of an idea—prophetic pragmatism—as mediated through the real and metaphorical black body from the perspective of a seemingly “post-racial” America. 4 This corporeal linage connected the democratic principles of classical pragmatists to the non-violent mass movement of Dr. Martin Luther King’s SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) to the revolutionary aesthetics and prophetic imperatives of black power theology. Though West’s prophetic pragmatism makes no explicit claim to racial essentialism it is deeply rooted in a sense that blacks historical experience of American capitalism has endowed them with a unique perspective on its racial imperatives and consequences. As objects and agents of these processes blacks have acquired a moral authority and obligation to speak truth to power. 5 Prophetic pragmatism’s focus upon the particular degradation of black humanity—in often explicitly corporeal terms—echoes #BlackLivesMatter claim that while all lives matter, not all lives are, or have been, at equal risk in America. 6 Truth, according to West, is not an analytical matter of correspondence between formal propositions and a particular slice of

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reality, but rather a way of life, an existential mode of being that allows suffering to speak in visceral terms which blacks were and are uniquely positioned to articulate. Coming to terms with the tragic nature of suffering was an acknowledgment of one’s mortality and the desire to embrace this finitude through the creation of a beloved community. 7 For West “justice is what love looks like in public,” 8 endowing the pursuit of social, economic, and political justice with a corporeal character: the public black body reimagined as an index of social justice or lack thereof. Given the ever-mutable nature of capitalism whereby overt forms of racial inequality recede into a neoliberal consensus, reimagining black bodies as political indexes/agents is an attempt to come to grips with the corporeal and racial epistemologies of American capitalism. As Ta-Nehisi Coates reminds us, “Though America often understands itself as God’s handiwork, the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men.” 9 For Coates the real and metaphorical black body and blackness writ large are imperatives of American capitalism: their historic subjugation as foundational to American political economy. Given the explicitly corporeal nature of these racial imaginings, counter ideologies such as prophetic pragmatism invariably revealed a similar preoccupation with the body as a site of both repression and resistance in the making of modern America. 10 Prior to examining the genealogies of prophetic pragmatism a brief examination of its architect is in order. Over the better part of four decades Cornel West has established himself as a seminal figure in African American thought and one of the nation’s leading public intellectuals. Trained at Harvard and Princeton in Near Eastern Languages and Philosophy, West’s work strives to reconcile the sociopolitical and cultural demands of the black freedom struggle—as mediated through the motifs of the black church—to broader western humanist traditions of autonomous selfhood. 11 Throughout his time at Harvard, Yale, and Union Theological Seminary, West’s scholarship sought to excavate the existential basis of an unfettered black humanity: to purge blackness of its proscribed pathological connotations. Yet his challenge, like generations of African American scholars prior, has been to assert black humanity within the very ideological and rhetorical structures predicated upon its very denial: to assert black humanity within the very structures which historically deem it to be less than human. To effectively square the circle of what W. E. B. DuBois termed the phenomena of “double consciousness,” which consigns African Americans to the contradictory status of being within and yet external to America. 12 In works such as Prophesy Deliverance: An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity! and The American Evasion of Philosophy, West drew upon Marxist social critique and the aesthetics of the black church to argue for a progressive black Christian humanism. Indeed for West the emancipatory and redemptive nature of the black experience was constitutive to the making of the modern and postmodern west. 13

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Prophetic pragmatism privileged “tragic action” over the abstraction of formal philosophical inquiry: a way of being in rather than merely reflecting upon the world. Indeed it is West’s avowedly public character that has made him the object of deep adoration and condemnation. West burst onto the national stage with Race Matters, a slim mediation on American race relations published at the height of the 1990s culture wars that sold in the millions. Following the success of Race Matters, West’s career trajectory increasingly veered outside the academy including forays into political activism, spoken word, jazz, hip hop, Hollywood films, art and an endless stream of media appearances. 14 To some West’s seemingly inexhaustible pursuit of publicity blunted his once rigorous intellectual critiques whilst his supporters argued that it was in public forums that his critiques were most needed. 15 West’s recent rebukes of his one-time confidante President Obama has sparked intense debate within black America over the nature of public intellectuals and identity politics in the twentieth-first century. Critics claim that these critiques of the first African American president are spiteful, inaccurate, and only provide ammunition to the president’s more nefarious opponents. Yet for his many supporters West is a tribune of courage and integrity enjoined to speak truth to power like the Judeo-Christian prophets of old. 16 Indeed delineating the line where West the scholar begins and West the activist ends is a confounding enterprise. As a self-described “bluesman in the life of the mind, and a jazzman in the world of ideas,” 17 West blurs the line between academia and activism evincing the conundrum of the public intellectual (notwithstanding its various racial connotations) and the nature of truth in the public sphere: debates whose roots stretch back well over a century. The contours of prophetic pragmatism were formed and shaped in the crucible of classical American pragmatism of the progressive era. Progressivism was characterized by a pervasive faith in empirical, scientific social reform mediated through an activist state. Spanning both the natural and social sciences progressive ideology linked inquiry to utility. 18 For the West the development of the pragmatist tradition at the turn of the nineteenth century was the most influential stream in American thought yet one which nearly eight decades on required drastic reform. His efforts to infuse the seemingly inert body of pragmatism with prophetic forms of “tragic action” necessitated resurrecting the mass democratic praxis espoused by pragmatist pioneers like William James and John Dewey. West was deeply informed by Dewey’s emphasis on pragmatism’s functionalist non-ideological character whereby the “truth” is a function not of ethics but of effectiveness. 19 In short the course of action that works—in solving a specific problem—is the right course of action in both the practical and respective ethical sense. This hyperutilitarian form of democratic praxis ostensibly freed peoples from the inhibiting strictures of tradition while embracing its more participatory impulses

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found in public displays of the body from political theater to mass marches. Like his pragmatist predecessors West conflated means and ends arguing that true social reform could only be brought about via mass participatory democracy: only a movement stepped in social ethics could affect a change in social consciousness more generally. 20 Notwithstanding pragmatism’s pretentions to studied objectivity it was invariably a product of its subjective historical context. Fin de siècle era America was a time in which ideas mattered deeply. Progressives abiding fear was that ideas inured to practice would ossify into meaningless theoretical abstractions: inquiry devoid of utility was irrelevant by definition. 21 Turn of the century cultures of management worshipped at no ideological alters save for that of efficiency. 22 No aspect of society escaped the problematizing progressive gaze and its attempts to reconcile form to function in the pursuit of social order whether it be fitting the right peoples to the right job or reconfiguring outmoded civic institutions—such as the judiciary and legislatures—to shifting demographic trends. For a cadre of self-appointed experts society became little more than a vast laboratory to test innumerable solutions for an array of suspected social “problems.” Progressive era America was awash in problems from the “Negro Problem,” “Labor Problem” to the “Woman problem.” 23 Yet the policies and practices of pragmatic reform were rooted in larger questions of authority, equality, expertise and the state. Ultimately pragmatism was a deeply schizophrenic ideology beholden to the cult of expertise endowed with a fundamentally emancipatory impulse that often pursued radical ends via moderate means. 24 Pragmatic reformism based on the management of difference and rationalization of power persisted well into the postwar era. Throughout its various permutations pragmatic expertise helped maintain the domestic liberal consensus, while waging the deeply ideological Cold War abroad. Stateside civil rights activists sought to reanimate pragmatisms latent social justice imperatives in the pursuit of racial equality. The postwar civil rights movement began with the landmark 1954 Brown vs. Board Supreme Court ruling citing the unconstitutionality of segregated public schools striking down the longstanding “separate but equal” clause governing state sponsored racial segregation. Yet the legislative success of Brown, facilitated by the likes of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), drew heavily on expert testimony regarding the perceived pathologies of racial segregation thereby reaffirming the power of the cult of expertise and a triumph of the postwar liberal consensus. 25 Salvaging pragmatism’s democratic impulses from the stifling—though at times progressive—dictates of expertise required a reimaging of its grassroots, mass participatory legacy: repurposing the pragmatism of the status quo into a praxis of social change. The civil rights movement embraced nonviolent civil disobedience as a postpragmatist rejoinder to the liberal status quo. 26 Regarding the terminology of

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post-pragmatist I am referring to a reconceptualization of classical progressive pragmatism in which ends were privileged over means to one in which means and ends were conflated albeit still in an ostensibly non-ideological utilitarian fashion. Classical and post-pragmatist theory differed over the relationship between means and ends while sharing a mutual aversion to imbuing either with an explicitly ideological character. Organizations such as Dr. Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and youth groups like the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) framed their lunch counter sit-ins, boycotts, and mass marches as means to an end—ending specific segregationist laws—and ends in and of themselves by bearing public witness to the injustice of said laws. The ideological specifics of these processes were immaterial in the face of the overarching imperative to solve a “problem”; which if nothing else was a decidedly pragmatic impulse. 27 For Dr. King the praxis of pragmatism—a form of ethical action—was linked to the agency of the black body in public. King’s lieutenants such as Bayard Rustin were well aware that their social and political capital derived chiefly from their ability to put thousands of black bodies in the streets of Birmingham, Selma, or Montgomery. Bodies whether mauled by police dogs, clubbed by batons, or soaked with high pressure water cannons served as both an appeal to, and indictment of, American claims to freedom and equality. Indeed nothing drove home the jarring contradictions of American race relations at the height of the Cold War more forcefully than the spectacle and imagery of black bodies being beaten in public and then beamed to a global audience. Conversely tactics that failed to mobilize sufficient bodies onto the street or misused their political capital to stage and transmit these images were failed stratagems by definition regardless of their intent. However by placing their bodies on the line these nonviolent protestors bore witness to the stark and brutalizing racial imperatives of the cultures of American capitalism from the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington to the labor activism of the fateful Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike of 1968. 28 To a watching world the corporeal aesthetics of activists struggling to embody “tragic action with revolutionary intent”—from the March on Washington through the brutal Selma march—revealed the public spectacle and degradation of black bodies as constitutive to the making of the American body politic. 29 For West, the civil rights movement led by Dr. King best represented the political project of prophetic pragmatism. Though King was not a pragmatist in the strictest sense, West places him firmly in the prophetic tradition. Whereas King’s pragmatism was invariably functionalist in nature facilitating “social motion”; said motion was informed and sustained by the themes of redemption, salvation, and justice inherent to the black church and the long black freedom struggle. 30 Pragmatism was merely a medium through

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which to affect the righteous moral political action needed to destroy de-jure and de-facto racial segregation. King’s genius lay in his ability to blend the secular and the sacred in an all-embracing moral vision forging alliances and coalitions along class, racial, and gender lines. West contends that King’s Gandhian methods of nonviolent resistance “highlighted forms of love, courage and discipline worthy of a compassionate prophet.” 31 Finally King’s appropriation of the civil discourses of freedom, liberty, and equality extended the tradition of American jeremiads exhorting the nation to moral renewal in honor of its stated founding principles. 32 These moral visions, disciplined courage, and moral renewal were embodied in the real and metaphorical public black body: reconstituted as a corporeal engine of social change. Though the socioeconomic and political considerations that mobilized these bodies onto the streets were decidedly pragmatic—informed by shifting domestic and geopolitical events such as the Cold War—the bodies in question functioned as agents of prophetic renewal. The insistent humanity or “tragic action” at the heart of King’s political project was mediated through visceral corporeal terms allowing suffering to speak across the racial divide. The experience and imagery of black bodies subjected to any number of public deprivations—whether torn apart by police dogs or blasted by high powered water cannons—transcended racial particularities emphasizing the fragility and common humanity of bodies under siege. 33 The violence visited upon black bodies in the streets forced observers to confront—even those who chose to turn away—the brutal un-truths of racial injustice in unsparing emotive terms. Each blow of the truncheon leveled at black bodies was an assault upon the republican body politic writ large: every broken black body an indictment of the nation’s exceptionalist mindset as a bastion of liberty and equality. Indeed American exceptionalism came in for an especial battering amidst the postcolonial turn of the 1960s and 70s. Widespread decolonization across the postwar global south engendered new paradigms of knowledge committed to collective and individual selfdetermination primarily under nationalistic auspicious. Postcolonial theory was both a temporal construct and a critique of the power networks that had sustained the colonial project within and beyond the metropole. Power and its various permeations stood at the heart of the postcolonial critique and the influence of Michel Foucault and his formulation of discursive power—with especial focus on their corporeal dynamics—were seminal to emergent postcolonial theory. 34 Foucault regarded all discourse, linguistic and otherwise, as technologies of power that served to confine people within specific ways of understanding the world and their place in it. 35 “Truth” was illusory given that the ethical discourse and suppositions needed to represent or express it were themselves subjective modes of power born of a specific set of historical circumstances. The notion of truth was therefore just one of power’s many variants immune to critical interrogation. Edward Said, the most in-

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fluential postcolonial theorist, applied Foucault’s thinking to Western writing about the Arab world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries via an interrogation of the “Other” a cultural construct representative of the pathological opposite of one’s own culture. Repeated over many decades, the rendering of the Arab “Other” hardened into a set of essentialist judgments and characterizations of the Arab world—or more specifically, non-occidental world—that Said called “Orientalism.” Said further defined Orientalism as a “science of imperialism,” his goal being to “reduce the effects of imperialist shackles on thought and human relations.” 36 Yet this binary distinction of the powerful colonizer/powerless colonized accorded little agency to the latter: agency being the sole overview of the dominant party. Subaltern theorists such as Dipesh Chakrabarty noted that positing the colonized as mere reflection of the colonizer reduced the former to little more than the sum of their pathologies devoid of the autonomous agency which postcolonial inquiry sought to reclaim in the first place. 37 Moreover Said was ambiguous on the role of violent agency whether as a means to an end—or in the case of radical thinkers like Frantz Fanon—an end in and of itself necessary for individual and collective emancipation whose appeal stateside far outstripped any of his postcolonial theorist peers. 38 The most prominent manifestation of postcolonial revolutionary ideology in the American context was the Black Panther Party. Founded in Oakland in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale as the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, the Panthers were initially focused on challenging anti-black police brutality in Oakland. However the group’s activities soon expanded into community development initiatives such as free breakfast and health clinics and a broader global vision that sought to link the black experience in America to the anti-colonial experience worldwide. It was through these community outreach programs in Sacramento that a teenage Cornel West was first introduced to the Panthers revolutionary nationalism and the writings of Karl Marx. Like many young black men of the era, West was drawn to the Panthers revolutionary aesthetic and martial demeanor evocative of an unbowed and uncompromising black humanity that complicated pre- and postFoucauldian notions of the prone subject. Notwithstanding the party’s deep antipathy to the black church, the deeply devout West saw the Panthers as “the highest form of deniggerization in niggerized America” and the “greatest threat to American apartheid because it was indigenous in composition, interracial in strategies and tactics, and international in vision and analysis.” 39 Ultimately the Panthers sought to Americanize, or in contemporary parlance “Negrify,” the praxis of postcolonialism and violent revolution espoused by Fanon as a direct repudiation of Dr. King’s “beloved community” born of moral suasion. Conversely the Panthers acute sense of political theater and revolutionary aesthetics—from street corner denunciations of police officers as “pigs” to the public display of firearms—embodied black radical

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claims to justice in the public sphere. Whereas for King the pursuit and prospective attainment of justice was based on the public sacrifice of self through non-violent means the Panthers sought a righteous autonomy through any means necessary. The Panthers, despite a brief flirtation with black nationalism, were unique amongst their radical black contemporaries in eschewing notions of racial essentialism in favor of sustained critiques of the structural racism of American and global capitalisms. 40 The sartorial trappings of black nationalism from dashikis to Afros—derided by the Panthers as “pork-chop nationalism”—were dismissed as mere posturing and ineffectual in affecting true revolutionary change. Marxism, and specifically its Leninist variant, formed the basis of the Panthers radicalism yet it was a Marxism filtered through the particulars and needs of the black experience. As a self-described “revolutionary internationalist movement,” 41 the Panthers posited blackness as a transnational identity rooted in exploitation. Indeed it was this common experience of exploitation that yoked the black experience in the United States to that of colonized peoples and anti-imperialists of color from Cuba and Algeria to Vietnam. Race and racial identities were posited as both functions and agents of the colonial and subsequent anti-colonial project. However the Panthers deployed Marxist critiques pragmatically; foregrounding Marxism’s utility as an incisive critique of capitalism’s structural inequalities whilst evincing a keen awareness of the limits of a materialist determinism that often obscured the racial dynamics of said processes. 42 West cites his youthful encounter with the Panthers as critical to his understanding of the racial imperatives of American capitalism: “They were the ones who started raising [the issue of] the distribution of wealth when I was 13. . . . I’ve been asking the same question ever since, see I learned it from Huey, and Bobby.” 43 Through their efforts to break with the traditional dictates and institutions of the black freedom struggle (namely the black church); develop a new mass revolutionary consciousness; and privilege means (i.e., violence) over ends the panthers created the praxis and corporeal dynamics of a black revolutionary pragmatism constitutive to the development of prophetic pragmatism. West’s attempts to reshape classical pragmatism drew on the ostensibly incompatible strains of postcolonial Marxist theory and the prophetic Christianity of the black church. Yet taken in concert West argued that these ideologies could provide much needed “critical empathy” and facilitate “prophetic and progressive social motion” to tackle social inequality inside and outside the academy. 44 Whereas the postcolonial critiques of the Panthers helped chart the shape and routes of motion it was the righteous, impassioned force of the black prophetic tradition that helped sustain this motion as a movement. The genealogies of prophetic pragmatism stretched from the classical pragmatism of the progressive era through the ethical non-violent pragma-

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tism of the early civil rights movement to the revolutionary pragmatisms of the postcolonial turn yet its most significant roots were to be found in the prophetic traditions of the black freedom struggle. West’s assertion that truth is a way of life, a lived reality, as opposed to a set of propositions is perhaps best realized through his articulation of the prophetic dynamics of prophetic pragmatism. Historically West’s fashioning of prophetic pragmatism drew on an extensive legacy of prophetic resistance from Nat Turner, to Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. DuBois, and Martin Luther King. Peoples connected by a deep millennial utopianism (whether explicitly Christian or secular in character) tempered with “a profound sense of the tragic character of life” 45 —specifically African American life—and history. For West, the African American prophetic tradition is defined less by its redemptive religiosity and more by its tragically critical character forged not in transcendent but material contexts. The goal of prophetic pragmatism was not simply to redeem souls but society itself. However, positing the black prophetic tradition as social critique necessitated a workable theoretical framework to delineate past, present, and future forms of racial injustices which accounted for West’s aforementioned adoption of a postcolonial methodology which despite its materialist limitations provided a workable historical critique of the racial dynamics of American political economy. West’s attempts to leaven the stark materialism of revolutionary postcolonial theory with the fierce moral imperatives and redemptive urgency of the African American sacred tradition led to his embrace of Black Liberation theology of the late 1960s and 70s forged at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. 46 Black Liberation theology was an attempt to analyze the dynamics of the nascent black power movement through the lens of Christianity and the black church. More specifically, it was an attempt to contextualize contemporary black power ideology—with its uncompromising demand for black autonomy—in the wider history of the black freedom struggle. Civil rights activist Stokley Carmichael first articulated the term “Black Power” in 1966 as the only appropriate response to intransigent white racism. Black Power was a bold assertion of black personhood; an attempt to be recognized as “thou” in spite of the “other” white supremacy conceived blacks to be. 47 Black liberation theology’s chief architect, James H. Cone, cited black power as “the most important development in American life of the past century” 48 and sought to reconcile it to the redemptive rhetoric and aesthetics of the black church. Cone’s acute historical sensibilities put him at the forefront of a larger trend of a theological “re”-discovery of history. 49 Notwithstanding their philosophical and historical limitations (such as an often overweening ahistoricism), liberation theologians such as Cone helped put historical processes, social analysis, and political praxis at the center of theological discourse in many of the era’s seminaries and divinity schools. 50 For Cone,

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Black Power’s radical commitment to black autonomy was neither incidental nor antithetical to Christianity but rather representative of Christ’s central message to twentieth-century America embodied in the suffering of black peoples. The explicitly corporeal nature of black suffering from the slave masters whips to the truncheons of the present day was representative of the suffering yet redemptive body of Christ. Moreover just as Christians achieved salvation through the suffering Christ, so too could America be redeemed through the battered black body. Indeed an acknowledgment of black suffering required confronting and dismantling the white supremacist epistemologies that undergirded the cultures of American capitalism. 51 The broken and battered black body was the metaphorical and living medium, the embodied critique—through which said change could be affected. Yet much like Latin American forms of liberation theology, black power theology was shaped and driven by the need to empower marginalized communities. Both drew on Marxist critiques to delineate the systemic nature of racial and class oppression to bring peoples to a realization of their condition whilst endowing them with the moral certitude and righteous anger to change their situation. Yet whereas Cone tended to stress the eschatological prophetic of black liberation theology West adopted a more emancipatory tone in his prophetic imaginings. Black Christianity promotes a gospel that “empowers black people to survive and struggle in a God-forsaken world.” 52 Indeed for West the battered black body was not a harbinger of doom and despair but a redemptive salve to a sick and corrupted nation. Prophetic pragmatism remains a contradictory, often elusive, philosophy straddling the utopian and the practical in its pursuit of social justice. Notwithstanding its utopian pretentions, prophetic pragmatism is a resolutely empirical philosophy whose veracity—like all good pragmatist thought—is rooted in its social utility: that which achieves the intended change is both the right and true course of action. Given its intensely empirical and public nature to affect far reaching social change prophetic pragmatism evinces a decidedly corporeal character. Indeed it is the medium of the black body as both metaphor and lived experience, which connects the pragmatic nonviolence of Dr. King to the revolutionary aesthetics of the Panthers to the prophetic suffering of black liberation theology. The seemingly infinite historical malleability of prophetic pragmatism is anchored by the shifting yet embodied public truths of black corporalities: the social contours of prophetic pragmatism made flesh. The mere presence of autonomous black bodies in the public sphere, bodies historically seen as deficient by definition, evinces and challenges the racialist imperatives of the cultures of American capitalism. West’s presence on the streets of Ferguson and ongoing work with the #BlackLivesMatter movement represents a culmination of a decades-long quest to marry “tragic action with revolutionary intent” 53 in the pursuit of social justice. A justice predicated on the autonomy and inviolable integrity

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of black lives and black bodies. In short, if the contemporary crisis of American political economy has been built upon the historical degradation and obfuscation of blackness then the alleviation of said crisis and the pursuit of justice can only be brought about by affirmation of black humanity along socioeconomic, political, and cultural lines. Indeed perhaps the greatest affront to racial justice and black humanity is the hundreds of thousands of black men literally disappeared from the public realm through the mass incarceration of large swaths of black communities writ large. 54 Notwithstanding the post-racial pieties of contemporary discourse race still matters as a concrete means to define and create social difference. As Paul Gilroy reminds us, “There is no racism in general” 55 as race is always historically contingent and yet said malleability is often naturalized in corporeal terms. The persistence of race can be attributed to its infinitely malleable nature—what some scholars have referred to as the “changing same.” Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua notes that “racial capitalism has been undying and constantly changing, shedding its old skin as Douglass said it would and reappearing in ever newer forms: slavery, sharecropping, proletarianization, and the labor marginalization” 56 of contemporary globalization. Invariably, racial capitalism will inevitably mutate to accommodate the nation’s shifting racial demographics from a traditional white–black binary, to a brown or beige America in which so-called racial minorities will constitute the majority population. 57 Foregrounding the tragic yet emancipatory character of black corporalities reveals how the subjugation and degradation of black bodies from the auction block to Ferguson has been constitutive of, rather than contrary to, the making of American political economy. West’s efforts to bear witness through the praxis of prophetic pragmatism to the indignity accorded black humanity draws on both secular and sacred notions of black suffering and liberation. Viewed through a corporeal lens prophetic pragmatism can provide us with the tools to decipher and challenge the ostensibly embodied and naturalistic racial epistemologies of American capitalism, which continue to ensnare us all across the globe. REFERENCES Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New Press, 2012. Baker, Lee. Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Banta, Martha. Taylored Lives: Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen and Ford. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993. Charkbabtory, Dipesh. “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts?” Representations 37 (Special Issue: Imperial Fantasies and Postcolonial Histories; Winter, 1992): 1–26. doi:10.2307/2928652. Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015. Cone, James H. Black Theology and Black Power. New York: Seabury Press, 1969.

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“Cornel West, Others Arrested at Ferguson Protest.” NBC News video, 1:15. October 13, 2014. http://www.nbcnews.com/video/nbc-news/56227140#56227140. Davey, Monica, and Alan Blinder. “Ferguson Protests Take New Edge, Months After Killing.” New York Times, October 13, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/14/us/st-louis-protests.html. Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation. The Black Panther Party: Service to the Peoples Programs. Edited by David Hilliard. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2008. DuBois, William E. B. “The Souls of Black Folk.” In Three Negro Classics, by Booker T. Washington, William E. B. Dubois, and James Weldon Johnson, 207–390. New York: Avon Books, 1965. Dyson, Michael E. “The Ghost of Cornel West: What Happened to America’s Most Exciting Black Scholar?” New Republic, April 19, 2015. https://newrepublic.com/article/121550 / cornel-wests-rise-fall-our-most-exciting-black-scholar-ghost. Ellison, Ralph. “An American Dilemma: A Review.” In The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, edited by John Callahan, 328–40. New York: Modern Library, 1995. Fioramonti, Lorenzo. How Numbers Rule the World: The Use and Abuse of Statistics in Global Politics. London: Zed Books, 2014. Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality: Volume 1, Introduction. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. Gilroy, Paul. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2000. ———. “One Nation Under a Groove: The Cultural Politics of Race and Racism in Britain.” In The Anatomy of Racism. Edited by David T. Goldberg, 263–82. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press, 1990. Holt, Thomas. Children of Fire: A History of African Americans. New York: Hill and Wang, 2010. Kazin, Michael. American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation. New York: Knopf, 2011. Koditschek, Theodore, Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, and Helen Neville, eds. Race Struggles. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. Lawrie, Paul R. D. Forging a Laboring Race: The African American Worker in the Progressive Imagination. New York: New York University Press, 2016. Ledwidge, Mark, Kevern Verney, and Inderjeet Parmar, eds. Barack Obama and the Myth of a Post-Racial America. London: Routledge, 2013. Livingstone, James. Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850–1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Menard, Louis. The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. Mills, David. “The West Alternative.” Washington Post, August, 8, 1993. https:// www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/magazine/1993/08/08/the-west-alternative/ 68efa785-43be-4a88-bff0-fd1ea6a005b2/. Roediger, David. Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. ———. “White Without End? The Abolition of Whiteness; or the Rearticulation of Race.” In Race Struggles, edited by Theodore Koditschek, Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, and Helen Neville, 98–107. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. Roediger, David, and Elisabeth Esch. The Production of Difference: Race and the Management of Labor in U.S. History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Singh, Nikhil P. Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Tosh, John. The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of History. London: Routledge, 2015. Van Deburg, William L. New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965–1975. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. West, Cornel. The American Evasion of Philosophy. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.

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———. The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1991. ———. Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America. New York: Routledge, 1993. ———. Prophetic Fragments: Illuminations of the Crisis in American Religion and Culture. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1993. West, Cornel, and David Ritz. Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, A Memoir. New York: Smiley Books, 2009. Yancy, George, and Judith Butler. “What’s Wrong With ‘All Lives Matter’?” New York Times, January, 12, 2015. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/12/whats-wrong-with-alllives-matter/.

NOTES 1. Davey and Blinder, “Ferguson Protests.” 2. West, quoted in “Cornel West,” 00:14–00:32. 3. West, The American Evasion of Philosophy, 269–71. 4. On contemporary discourses of “post-racialism,” see Ledwidge, Verney, and Parmar, Barack Obama and the Myth of a Post-Racial America. 5. West, The American Evasion of Philosophy, 270–71. 6. Yancy and Butler, “What’s Wrong With ‘All Lives Matter’?” 7. West, The American Evasion of Philosophy, 269–71. 8. Ibid., 271 (emphasis added). 9. Coates, Between the World and Me, 12. 10. For further analysis on the malleability and historically contingent nature of racial ideology—along corporeal lines or otherwise—see Baker, Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture; Roediger, Colored White; and Gilroy, Against Race, 11–15. 11. West, The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought, xv–xxxiv. 12. W. E. B. DuBois, “The Souls of Black Folk,” 213–15. 13. Like his idol W. E. B. DuBois—the leading African American intellectual of the twentieth century—West was committed not to the dismantling of the western cannon but to its radical reconfiguration, necessitated by an insistent black humanity. See West, The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought, xv–xxxiv. 14. Ibid. 15. Dyson, “The Ghost of Cornel West.” 16. Ibid. 17. West and Ritz, Brother West, 2–3. 18. Livingstone, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850-1940, xxiii–xxv. 19. West, The American Evasion of Philosophy, 3–8. 20. Ibid. 21. Menard, The Metaphysical Club, xxi. 22. Banta, Taylored Lives, 4–6. Banta notes that Taylorism or industrial standardization was an extended narrative structure and discourse system that extended far beyond the factory floor to encompass every aspect of cultural existence. 23. On the “problematic” character of race and labor management as constitutive to the development of modern American labor economies, see Lawrie, Forging a Laboring Race, 11–12; and Roediger and Esch, The Production of Difference. 24. Fioramonti, How Numbers Rule the World, 20. Fioramonti’s reading of Max Weber on bureaucracy posits that the essence of bureaucracy is the power of technology, which leads to the marginalization of all irrational and emotional elements associated with political factors; that is, human factors (i.e., race), which escape the precision of calculation. 25. Holt, Children of Fire, 304–6. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. On civil rights critiques of American political–labor economy, see Kazin, American Dreamers, 218–20.

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29. West, The American Evasion of Philosophy, 211–35, 269–71. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 270. 32. Ibid., 271. 33. Ibid. 34. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 139–44. 35. Tosh, The Pursuit of History, 241–43. 36. Ibid., 242. 37. Charkbabtory, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History.” Perhaps the most significant critique on the discourse of racial pathology was articulated by the author Ralph Ellison in his scathing review of Gunnar Mydral’s seminal 1944 liberal treatise An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. Ellison took Mydral and his peers to task, remarking, “But can a people (its faith in an idealized American Creed not-withstanding) live and develop for over three hundred years simply by reacting? Are American Negroes simply the creation of white men, or have they at least helped to create themselves out of what they found around them?” See Ellison, An American Dilemma: A Review, 369. 38. Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon, 156–65. 39. Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, The Black Panther Party, ix–x. 40. Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon, 156–64. 41. Ibid., 158. 42. Ibid. 43. Mills, “The West Alternative.” 44. West, American Evasion of Philosophy, 269–71. 45. Ibid., 271. 46. West, “The Making of an American Democratic Socialist of African Descent,” xv–xxxiv. 47. Holt, Children of Fire, 338–40. 48. Ibid., 339. 49. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, 1. 50. West, Keeping Faith, 298–99. 51. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, 2–9. 52. West, Prophetic Fragments, 165. 53. West, American Evasion of Philosophy, 270 . 54. Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 3–12. 55. Gilroy, “One Nation,” 265. 56. Quoted in Gilroy, “One Nation,” 266. 57. Koditschek and Sundiata, Race Struggles, 38.

Chapter Five

Jacques Rancière, Mass Education, and the Linguistic Adventure around Truth Charles Bingham

I begin this chapter with a personal anecdote. At least once a year I teach a large lecture course entitled “Social Issues in Education.” This is a second year university course, an elective. Somewhere toward the beginning of the semester, I ask my students to calculate the number of hours they have spent in school. After a few minutes calculating on their phones, students generally respond that they have so far spent twenty thousand or more hours attending. My point for doing this exercise with my students is to prove to them that education not only involves various social issues—issues that sociologists of education commonly deal with—but that education is itself a social issue. Given this twenty thousand hours, it is safe to say that people in the developed world are hyper-saturated with education. We spend enough hours in classrooms that many of our commonly shared experiences get inflected by the school experience. We are hyper-saturated with the public experience of sitting next to uncommon others sharing the common goal of attaining an education. This hyper-saturation, I contend, includes learning what truth means in the public space of school and elsewhere. Yet while getting to truth has certainly been a common concern of educational theorists, the school’s role in performing the nature of truth has not often been investigated. An outstanding exception is to be found in the work of Jacques Rancière. In this chapter I use the work of Rancière to examine these many hours of public experience as a phenomenon of truth-production. As I will show, Rancière’s work puts into question the school as a form of truth-production. He does so especially through his account of Joseph Jacotot, a radical educator who 79

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centuries ago noticed the detrimental aspects of a “society pedagogicized.” 1 This historical observation of a “society pedagogicized” has come to fruition today. It has come to fruition in the disciplinary experience culminating in the twenty thousand hours my students spend in mass education’s particular form of truth-production. Rancière’s work shows how truth is currently produced in the form of school. Further, his educational theorizing provides a counter-narrative to the dominant approaches to truth that mass education tends to promulgate. To begin, I elaborate the way three dominant educational theories have positioned truth in pedagogy. I outline traditional, progressive, and critical theories of education. Thereafter, Rancière’s conception of the explanatory role of school is detailed, along with an analysis of the way traditional, progressive, and critical education function under the rubric of explanation. Next, Rancière’s linguistic analysis of truth is introduced with its links to politics and aesthetics. I detail Rancière’s conception of the arbitrariness of language in the context of the democratic actor and the poet, and contrast this arbitrariness to the explanatory language of the school. Ultimately, I argue that mass education as it now functions is not the best place to access truth in spite the claims of dominant educational theories. Truth is best left to political actors and poets who embrace language in all its arbitrariness. TRUTH IN TRADITIONAL, PROGRESSIVE, AND CRITICAL EDUCATIONAL THEORY Education is commonly described in one of three ways. These ways roughly correspond to the traditional, progressive, and critical models of education. As a traditional project, education is conceived as a platform for disseminating a common set of learnings. These learnings will, in turn, enable citizens to share a common language in the public sphere. Such learnings may or may not derive from the experiences of the student since traditional education is not concerned with the private lives of students, but with the common language that needs to be fostered so they can speak with others in the public sphere. Progressive education shares the same liberalist tendencies of traditional theory, but progressives are more concerned about the bridge to be constructed between private experience and public life. So while the progressive orientation shares the desire to create a common language that will enable citizens to communicate in the public sphere, progressive educators insist that a common language can only be acquired through scaffolding that includes the particular experience of each particular person. Thus one must link private experience to public discourse. From the critical point of view, both the traditional and progressive accounts fall short. Instead, education itself is identified as a tool that has historically been used to foster inequality.

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Education must be changed so that it no longer serves hegemony. In the school, a common language must be forged through ideological critique. Only thereafter can “ideal” speech lead to democratic engagement. 2 These three orientations also have different assumptions about the status of truth and its relation to education. While each construes truth to be an attainable educational goal, each offers a different version of truth’s relation to education. Following the traditional model of using direct instruction to expose students to a common body of knowledge, education transports the student from where he or she is, presently, toward the true. The true is where the student must arrive. It is the common language to be shared. The true is what one must be exposed to through direct instruction. From the progressive perspective, truth is to be shared by all, but it must be shared in a pragmatic way, in a way that speaks to experience. Progressives are generally aligned with William James’s famous statement on truth’s pragmatics, that truth is an idea “upon which we can ride.” 3 In other words, the truths to be learned through education need to be grounded in the particular experience of each person if they are to be successfully used (as opposed to merely passively understood) in community. In contrast, the critical perspective maintains that education can neither bring students to the true by direct instruction, nor can it do so by appealing to experience. For criticalists the truth is not easy to attain because it is hidden behind a veil of ideological obfuscation. When schools categorize people and create hierarchies, when they educate some students better than others, they usually do so in a covert way. Truth for criticalists is to be revealed behind the ideological and structural inequalities that privilege some people and oppress others. The critical project thus aims to remove the façade of education, whether that façade be traditional or progressive, so that the truth of power and oppression can be exposed. Notably, each of these—the progressive, traditional, and critical—import an Enlightenment orientation toward truth that is grounded in an assumption that the school form as it exists can be a linguistic conduit toward truth. Traditionalism, for example, entails a view of truth that comes straight out of the Enlightenment’s concern for a public space, a public language, that each person can share. Progressivism shares the same view, but with an added concern for the experience and psychological development of the student. The critical orientation toward truth comes primarily from the philosophy of Marx, and shares with traditionalism and progressivism what might be called a vehicular understanding of truth in education. That is to say, critical educational theory, like the traditional and the progressive, presumes that education can move the student so that he or she arrives at the truth. But in the case of criticalism, the veil of ideological obfuscation must be removed before education can transport the student to truth. While these three orientations offer different, and influential, paradigms for thinking about the attainment of truth through education, none of the

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three consider the status of truth as a function of education. Dominant approaches to education do not entertain the notion that education itself might promulgate a particular metaphor for the status of truth. They each import an Enlightenment version of truth which ignores the workings of education itself. In contrast, Rancière has detailed in his major work on pedagogy, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, that it is possible to reconstruct pedagogy not as subservient to Enlightenment truth, but as a form of “ignorant” intersubjectivity leading to a radical form of intellectual emancipation. 4 PEDAGOGY’S EXPLANATORY ROLE: THE COLLUSION OF PROGRESSIVISM AND CRITICALISM Before offering Rancière’s analysis of truth in school, it is first helpful to look at his more general analysis of the school’s explanatory function, and the way that both progressivism and criticalism collude in this function. Arguably, Rancière’s most important contribution to educational theory lies not in the more obvious description of “universal teaching” one finds in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, but in his attention to the form of the school in the context of Western democracies and Western political philosophy. The importance of this contribution can be re-stated succinctly by saying that the school, and by extension pedagogy in general, has a function that commonly goes unnoticed in educational theory. It has an explanatory function. That is to say, the school does something by the very fact of being a school at the same time that it affords an opportunity for teaching and learning. The school, Rancière argues, promulgates a model described in Plato’s Republic. The republic “is a city in which legislation is entirely resumed in education— education, however going beyond the simple instruction of the schoolmaster and being offered at any moment of the day in the chorus of what is visually and aurally up for grabs.” 5 The republic runs smoothly because it establishes schools that explain an “archipolitical” order. 6 The school, in Western democracies, continues this explanatory function. It thus has a double role according to Rancière. The school not only educates citizens—whether that education be traditional, progressive, or critical. It also performs, in the arena of knowledge acquisition, an ordering that echoes the political ordering of society. As Rancière points out, “The idea of a master who transmits knowledge to a student or a learner who is in front of the master, and who doesn’t know something, this idea is in reality a cosmology and not simply a method.” 7 The school gives order by performing explanations. It might seem, at first glance, that only traditional education partakes in this explanatory paradigm that is denounced by Rancière. For example, it might be argued that progressive education, with its condemnation of traditional methods, is none other than a condemnation of the detrimental effects

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of too much explanation. This seems to be the case with John Dewey’s critique of traditionalism. Dewey, after all, is concerned with creating educational situations that are less about “verbal methods” and more about direct experience. 8 He is critical of traditional education’s focus on abstract linguistic symbols, and instead advocates a return to practice. However, Dewey’s polemics against traditional education, as well as his extended efforts to establish a progressive movement in education that would not be explanatory, are themselves part of an explanatory pedagogy. Dewey explains how human beings learn, he explains how traditional education is full of faults, and he explains how educators might better organize curriculum and instruction in order to improve teaching and learning. Dewey actually enacts the ironic double explanation that he condemns in others. This is the lesson one draws from Rancière’s account of the school’s explanatory function: There cannot be a method of education that does not partake in the explanatory order of sociality. As soon as any form of education becomes a method, then it will, by virtue of being a method, be an explanation of how human beings learn, and what they should learn. It might seem, too, that critical education is not explanatory because it offers an explicit critique of explanation. Paulo Freire, for example, criticizes traditional pedagogy for engaging in the oppressive psychic dynamics of over-explaining. For Freire, when things are too much explained, the oneexplaining obtains a structural superiority over the one-explained-to. This is precisely the “banking” situation. In such a situation, the Hegelian dynamic of master and slave sets in. The one-explained-to lives vicariously through the words of the one-explaining, as Freire notes in Pedagogy of the Oppressed: “What characterizes the oppressed is their subordination to the consciousness of the master.” 9 As the oppressor narrates, the listeners become “beings for another.” 10 This psychic dynamic gets established precisely because there is too much explaining done in traditional education, and not enough dialogue happening. In Freire’s case, too, however, a method—problem-posing education—gets introduced in the form of explanation. Thus, in spite of the fact that problem-posing education presents itself in the form of an antidote to narration, the theory expounded by Freire is a narrated theory. It is explained methodologically in a way true to the form of school Rancière critiques. EXPLANATION, LANGUAGE, AND TRUTH Rancière’s work on the explanatory order is best linked to the concept of truth by noting that when one uses explanation, one assumes that truth can be arrived at by a sequence of propositional statements. During explanation, one uses language to present the truth. One establishes a certain linguistic relation

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with truth. When one uses language to explain something, one draws a direct line from the word to truth, from the word that explains, to the truth of the thing explained. For Rancière, this direct line from language to truth is the basis of an explanatory folly that drives every form of the school. The propensity to explain ignores a central aspect of language, an aspect that Rancière emphasizes in many of his writings, not only in his educational work—that language is arbitrary. Because language is arbitrary, one can never draw a direct line from the word to truth. “Truth is not told,” writes Rancière, It is whole, and language fragments it; it is necessary, and languages are arbitrary. It was this thesis on the arbitrariness of languages—even more than the proclamation of universal teaching—that made Jacotot’s teaching scandalous. 11

The folly of the school is that it misconstrues the relation between language and truth. This is because the school ignores the arbitrary nature of language, treating language as if words cement signifiers to signifieds in some steadfast way. In order to more clearly understand the folly of the school—that is to, the educational/explanatory relation to truth—it is useful to juxtapose it to Ranceire’s unschooled analysis of language’s arbitrary relation to truth. Rancière’s work in political theory, in aesthetics, as well as in education are committed to this understanding of language’s arbitrary nature, and thus to language’s incommensurable relation to the truth. With regard to political theory, Rancière posits, in On the Shores of Politics, the arbitrary nature of language as an “unreality of representation.” 12 This is to say that language cannot directly represent reality. It cannot say truth. But far from being disappointed with the arbitrariness of language, Rancière uses representation’s unreality as a hopeful point of departure for those who would truly aspire to participate in a democratic order. Thus, “the democratic man” is “a being capable of embracing a distance between words and things that is not deception, not trickery, but humanity.” 13 So while language is too arbitrary to access truth directly, this fact is not cause for dismay for one who would participate in a true democracy, it is instead a point of hope. That language is arbitrary means that there is always hope to reconfigure the sensible. If language were not arbitrary, if words were already fixed to truth, then there would be little space for human beings to insert themselves differently into the sensible’s distribution. There would be no opportunity for subjectification. 14 Thus, Rancière notes in On the Shores of Politics that the arbitrariness of language turns both every utterance and every reception into an adventure which presupposes the tense interaction of two wishes: a wish to say and a wish to hear,

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each threatened at every moment by the danger of falling into the abyss of distraction, above which is stretched the tightrope of a will to meaning. 15

People can ignore the arbitrariness of language’s relation to the truth. But in doing so they ignore the possibility of true democratic interaction that reconfigures the social order. Rancière notes that each person who participates in politics, as opposed to “policing,” actually acknowledges, either wittingly or unwittingly, this arbitrariness of language. For, the person who participates in politics knows that language entails two levels: one that ostensibly connects language directly to truth, and one that proves just the opposite, that language is not fixed to truth. The second level of language is invoked every time a political subject acknowledges that the terms for understanding another are subject to redistribution rather than being fixed. Thus, in Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, Rancière writes, “In any social discussion in which there is actually something to discuss, this structure is implicated, a structure in which the place, the object, and the subjects of discussion are themselves in dispute and must in the first instance be tested.” 16 The political actor is not a person who takes language to be fixed to truth. Rather, such an actor is one who understands that utterances are always contestable rather than tethered to particular truths. The political actor has “this second-degree understanding.” 17 Such an understanding entails “the constitution of a specific speech scene in which it is a matter of constructing another relationship by making the position of the enunciator explicit.” 18 The political actor knows that language is arbitrary, and he or she will make such arbitrariness understood. Rancière also insists that the arbitrariness of language is a matter of aesthetics. It makes poets of those who would accept its arbitrariness: “The democratic man is a being who speaks, which is also to say a poetic being.” 19 This is so because one who accepts the arbitrariness of language, yet who goes on to communicate certain truths nevertheless, such a person must engage in the sort of translation that is both the joy and the burden of the artist. The artist knows how difficult yet necessary it is to convey truths that one takes to be universal, truths that have never been precisely articulated before. As Rancière notes in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, the poet works “in the gap between the silent language of emotion and the arbitrariness of the spoken tongue.” 20 Yet Rancière also generalizes this artistic element of arbitrary language. Such work is also no different than the work of any reasonable being who must struggle with the arbitrariness of language in an effort to convey one’s thoughts to another. He notes that “each one of us is an artist to the extent that he carries out a double process; he is not content to be a mere journeyman but wants to make all work a means of expression, and he is not content to feel something but tries to impart it to others.” 21 When one conveys one’s thoughts to others through language, one must give order,

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anew, to a handful of signs. These signs will form a work that will be interpreted by another. This order-giving, this work, and this interpretation, indicate the extent to which each person is an artist. Once again, only this time in an aesthetic rather than a political sense, an insistence on language’s arbitrariness is cause for celebration rather than remorse. This is because language’s arbitrariness pushes the poet to demonstrate his or her confidence in the commonality of human experience, a demonstration that will be cobbled out in spite of language’s inadequacies. While language is not naturally attached to this or that truth, the poet attempts to translate truth from one person’s experience to the experience of an interpreter, all the while knowing that language is never up to the task of such a translation. Language is thus seen to be arbitrary in the sense that it is not fixed directly to truth, but this does not mean that language is destined to be the solitary assignation of one’s own personal, and random, experience. As Rancière puts it in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, the poet “strives to say everything, knowing that everything cannot be said, but that it is the unconditional tension of the translator that opens the possibility of the other tension, the other will.” 22 In this way, “we understand what Racine has to tell us, that his thoughts are not different from ours, and that his expressions are only achieved by our counter-translation.” 23 The poet asks us to prove, through our own translation of the work, that while language may be arbitrary, it can still be cause for a commonality based on the translations and countertranslations of the poet and those who read the poem. TRUTH IN SCHOOLING Determined to separate itself from political actors and poets who do understand language’s arbitrariness is the school in all its forms. The school as it generally functions cannot allow language’s arbitrariness to be exposed because such exposure would undermine its explanatory teachings on truth. For education to function smoothly, and for its various methods to be employed according to the latest innovative research, the school insists that truth must be accessible through language. For the school, it cannot be the case that “truth is not told. It is whole, and language fragments it, it is necessary, and languages are arbitrary.” 24 If such were the case, then the school would be relegated to an unhappy mutism. Neither could subject matter be explained, nor could there be explanations of how to avoid, how to make experiential, or how to demystify, explanations of subject matter. It cannot be the case that “truth settles no conflict in the public place.” 25 If this were the case, then the pedagogical improvements that are recounted ad nauseam in newspapers and in journals would need to be stricken from record. On the contrary, the school must, and does, teach something about truth, something that keeps the

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school apart from political actors and poets. The school must explain things, thus demonstrating that truth is accessible through language, and that folly resides not in front of this curtain but behind it. The school, because it is believed to be the most effective place for teaching and learning to happen, stands as proof positive that the truth can be explained and that language is not arbitrary. As Rancière correctly indicates, it is not difficult to educate in an explanatory fashion. Thus the school constantly reaffirms the distance between its own success, on the one hand, and the potential “anarchy of the democratic circulation of knowledge” created by an arbitrary relation between language and truth, on the other.” 26 “There are a hundred ways to instruct, and learning also takes place in the stultifier’s school. . . . One always learns when listening to someone speak.” 27 To put this a bit differently, it is not the case that language’s arbitrariness prevents the success of explanatory education. Rather, the explanatory school sets the stage for its own success at the same time that it repeatedly introduces explanation as the prime mover of any social organism that deserves to be called a school. Indeed, the explanatory regime of education can’t lose, and this for two reasons. First, it “becomes the normal regime under which the explicatory institution is rationalized and justified.” 28 That is, education is deemed successful not only when it has explained well, but because it has explained well. Secondly, neither language’s arbitrariness, nor an awareness of language’s arbitrariness, can get in the way of explanatory justification precisely because neither proves anything about any sort of truth, including the particular educational truths that are “rationalized and justified” by the regime of explanatory education. 29 What can be noticed in Rancière’s work is thus an educational reversal of the way truth is to be understood. Earlier, the traditional, progressive, and critical orientations toward truth were described. I claimed that these orientations, while differing from one another, could happily be placed under the more general Enlightenment understanding of an education that functions as a vehicle to transport the student to truth. These prevalent accounts of mass schooling and the search for truth neglect to observe that truth’s status might be immanent, rather than transcendent, to education. Following Rancière’s observations on the metaphorical role of the school, the most prevalent descriptions of education’s relation to truth should thus be understood as mistaken. Such descriptions assume that truth is something “out there,” that truth is something usefully considered from a philosophical perspective, and that such a consideration could lead to valid conclusions about truth’s relation to education. These descriptions are, however, summarily set aside by Rancière who notes the following in The Ignorant Schoolmaster: “As for the truth, it doesn’t rely on philosophers who say they are its friend: it is only friends with itself.” 30 Common conceptions of truth in relation to education disregard the fact that explanatory education itself establishes the practices that

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underwrite such a description. After all, one must be educated in order to have such a way of describing truth. And here, “being educated” does not mean that one must have been to school for a number of years. It means rather that one has been inducted into an explanatory way of understanding the world which assumes that language is not arbitrary, that language rather establishes direct lines to truth. Explanatory education establishes lines to the truth of truth. CONCLUSION Informed by Rancière’s insights, it is reasonable to conclude that no form of education has a vehicular relation to the truth. Rather, education itself, as an explanatory form of social order, compels one to talk about truth in such a way. Rancière presents an account of truth that is immanent to education. It is an account of the explanatory regime’s confidence in the linguistic accessibility of facts, opinions, feelings, ideas, logics, and narratives. It is the account of a regime that would have only philosophers worrying about the status of truth, yet would promulgate a linguistic confidence in the ability to learn truth at even the most “elementary” levels, even in elementary school. It does not matter whether such an ability is fostered by traditional, progressive, or critical methods. A language-to-truth perspective is immanent to each of these theoretical perspectives. If truth’s presentation is immanent to education, such education is in stark contrast to the sort of pedagogy that Rancière advocates in the “universal teaching” of Joseph Jacotot. Rancière’s presentation of truth in pedagogy demonstrates that universal teaching will have no truck with truth that is explainable. He makes this demonstration through vivid descriptions of truth such as the ones that follow: “Each one of us describes our own parabola around the truth. No two orbits are alike. And this is why the explicators endanger our revolution.” 31 “But for all that, truth is not foreign to us, and we are not exiled from its country.” 32 And furthermore, “The experience of veracity attaches us to its absent center; it makes us circle around its foyer.” 33 Truth is a planet whose “territory” the emancipated person can only approach, and only in his or her particular way. There will never be a landing, and certainly not a landing that can be explained. As I have attempted to show, Rancière’s own perspective on truth is connected to his understanding of the arbitrariness of language, dependent upon language’s inability to access truth directly. On the flip side of this linguistic non-approachability of truth, stands Rancière’s presentation of truth itself, and of truth’s indifference to people: “Truth doesn’t bring people together at all. It is not given to us. It exists independently from us and does not submit to our piecemeal sentences.” 34 And as noted earlier, “Truth settles no conflict in the public place.” 35 Such an agnostic understanding of truth

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once again underscores the folly of explanation. For, our piecemeal sentences cannot explain truth no matter how much we might want them to. To return to the anecdote offered at the beginning of this chapter, it is now possible to reformulate a response to twenty thousand hours in school. In spite of the best laid plans of educational theorists, it is still necessary to posit a more radical break from linguistic truth. Rancière shows us that mass schooling promulgates the notion that human beings are neither political nor poetic. Thousands of hours in school situate human beings in an overconfident relation to truth in the public sphere. If Rancière’s analysis is accurate, the school is probably not a good place to remedy this overconfidence. Thus the three major approaches to education—traditional, progressive, and critical—have boarded a train that is already destined for the wrong station. School does not lead to truth, in spite of popular and theoretical claims to the contrary. Truth exists in spite of, and not because of, the practice of mass schooling. It may be the poet and the political animal who must offer this unexpected, unschooled lesson. It is they who are least confident of language’s veracity, and most dependent on its vicissitudes. REFERENCES Bingham, Charles, and Biesta, Gert. Jacques Rancière: Education, Truth, Emancipation. New York: Continuum, 2010. Dewey, John. How We Think. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 1970. Habermas, Jürgen. The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1985. James, William. Pragmatism and Other Writings. New York: Penguin, 2000. Rancière, Jacques. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. ———. “Entretien avec Jacques Ranciére.” Multitudes: Revue Politique, Artistique, Philosophique. Accessed May 25, 2016. http://www.multitudes.net/Entretien-avec-Jacques-Ranciere/. ———. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991. ———. On the Shores of Politics. London: Verso, 1995.

NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 130. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action. James, Pragmatism, 3. Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, 68. Ibid., 65. Translated from the French by the author. Rancière, Entretien avec Jacques Ranciére. Dewey, How We Think, 178. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 31. Ibid., 31.

90 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

Charles Bingham Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 60. Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, 51. Ibid., 51. Bingham and Biesta, Jacques Rancière, 33. Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, 81. Rancière, Disagreement, 55. Ibid., 46. Ibid., 46. Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, 51. Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 68. Ibid., 70. Ibid., 69–70. Ibid., 70. Ibid., 60. Ibid., 90. Rancière, Disagreement, 69. Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 102. Ibid., 122. Ibid., 122. Ibid., 60. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 90.

III

Journalism and Politics

Chapter Six

#NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement On Truth and Lies in an Affective Sense Christopher J. Gilbert

Truth is nonsense. At least, in April 2011, this is what one might have been led to believe. On the Senate floor, then Republican Minority Whip Jon Kyl delivered a speech that situated the Planned Parenthood Federation of America at the crux of budget disputes that were precipitating a government shutdown. Kyl and others in his party were calling for an end to federal funding for the program, which in 2011 received $363 million. Said Kyl: “Everybody goes to clinics, to hospitals, to doctors, and so on. Some people go to Planned Parenthood. But you don’t have to go [there] to get your cholesterol or your blood pressure checked. If you want an abortion, you go to Planned Parenthood, and that’s well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.” 1 Within hours, Politifact checked the veracity of this statement, and so did CNN, only to discover that abortions comprised approximately 3 percent of Planned Parenthood’s procedures, which also include cancer screening and treatment of sexually transmitted infections, and general women’s health services. Politifact pronounced the statement false using its online “Truth-OMeter.” CNN later announced the official word from Kyl’s spokespeople: his claim “was not intended to be a factual statement.” 2 That was April 8. On April 9, a cavalcade of reports and editorials betrayed the senator’s proverbial pants on fire. Op-ed columnist Gail Collins dubbed Kyl’s remark “the most memorable . . . to come out of politics since Newt Gingrich told the world that he was driven to commit serial adultery by excessive patriotism.” 3 Steve Benen mockingly lauded Kyl’s disclaimer as “an amazing way to justify all bogus claims—just make stuff up, and if anyone notices that you’re not telling the truth, simply explain that your nonsense was ‘not intended to be a factual statement.’” 4 Such nonsense 93

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constitutes a logic of falsehood that would have undoubtedly amused sardonic fabulist Ambrose Bierce, with its fabrication of “truth to which the facts are loosely adjusted to an imperfect conformity.” 5 And, perhaps most significantly, political comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert adopted Kyl’s logic as fodder for ridicule. I say most significantly not simply because Colbert and Stewart were so famed for their own politics of reductio ad absurdum, but rather because Colbert in particular, even more than Kyl, became the story. During his April 11 episode of The Colbert Report, Colbert joked that Kyl could not be considered “wrong” if he never meant to be “right.” 6 This mock defense was dovetailed by a clip displaying pundits on Fox News attempting to apologize for Kyl and his absurd claim. On April 12, Colbert kept up the charade, announcing that he had been “tweeting round-the-clock non-facts” 7 about the senator (such as “For the past ten years, Jon Kyl has been two children in a very convincing Jon Kyl suit” 8 ) complete with the hashtag, #NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement. He also noted that members of the Twitter community had been posting their own nonsensical untruths at a rate of 46.2 per minute—which, according to Colbert, “is the rate at which Jon Kyl catapults puppies into the sea.” 9 Countless news outlets captured the magnitude of the trend. In fact, conduct a Twitter search today and you are sure to find the meme alive and well, especially since it has circulated beyond the confines of its senatorial context and become a commonplace for commenting on the use of lies as bases for public policy, the ethics of political officials, the weakness of public journalism, the hypocrisies in moral or ideological outrage, or the banality of everyday dissemblance. Each tweet, in Colbert’s terms, points to a politics of expressing what “feels true” (which is to say that Kyl’s remark probably revealed his “true” feelings), and each reiteration of the hashtag that does not require reference to Colbert underscores the pervasiveness of truthiness as a cultural lexicon unto itself. 10 Each rendition also engenders the hashtag event’s exemplarity within a larger conjuncture: the so-called era of “post-truth politics.” Declarations that politics is somehow “post-truth,” or that we have all witnessed the “death” of facts, 11 hardly carry the same rhetorical weight as, say, Friedrich Nietzsche’s declaration of the death of God. Instead, they might signal that truth is dead as a political “god-term,” 12 which indicates a wide-ranging anxiety about the circulation of journalistic misinformation, the ubiquity of pseudo-journalists in the blogosphere, the corporatization of news media, and the emerging idea of a need for “truth vigilantes.” 13 As David Roberts of Grist asserts, the “key feature of the post-truth political landscape is that there are no longer universally recognized arbiters or referees of fact.” 14 There are, of course, plenty who are ready and willing to call foul (consider the recent fetishization of fact-checking). 15 But truth-tellers today belie a crucial problematic that has less to do with truthfulness in

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content than with “the fragility of the forms that carry truth” 16 (emphasis added). In other words, the matter lies in conditions of truth, which the rhetorical force of Colbert’s comic expressions help to reveal. Odd as it may seem, Colbert helped crystallize a sense of these conditions when he coined the neologism “truthiness” in the 2005 inaugural episode of his political comedy show, The Colbert Report. “Truthiness” has since become a cultural cliché for conveying the particularly affective investments that individuals or groups stake in a truth claim, rather than to the proof of its truthfulness as such. If, following Raymond Williams, we take keywords like “truthiness” seriously, we might therefore engage the problem of “post-truth” politics as more than the troubles of damned lies. Keywords are contact points for considering “certain activities and their interpretation” in public culture. 17 Importantly, words like “truth” embody “connections of meaning” that quaver when they are “offered, felt for, tested, confirmed, asserted, qualified, changed.” 18 So conceived, Colbert’s quip about “truthiness” as a mode of “felt” politics, or a means of “feeling” truth, is not so nonsensical. Or maybe it is. Regardless, “truthiness” exemplifies the significance of (non)sense as a rhetorical affectation of truth and lies. This chapter unfolds with an analysis of the cultural purchase (and politics) of the word “truthiness,” which, like other “problem-laden words,” entails clues “to changing political, social, and economic situations and needs” along with the “struggle[s] in their use . . . to give expression to new experiences of reality.” 19 I would add that, given the revival of professional protestations for reformed checks and balances within what Lawrence Grossberg might call “economies of truth production,” there is a sense in which certain keywords are vital because of their (de)legitimation in institutions and discourse. “Truthiness” is a marker for the perverted “fact” that lying both can and cannot work as a political principle, even as it functions as a foil for “making sense.” What is more, the so-called “Age of Truthiness” names a moment in which many people do not seem to care about truth as such, which is to say that it might be misguided to assume that truth is either sought after or desired by a wide swathe of individuals. Consequently, if “truth . . . is in the making,” 20 it is worthwhile to ground an examination of the cultural values of truth production in a lexis, or “a measure of shared experience.” 21 Gilles Deleuze serves as my foundation for reimagining truth not in propositions but rather between propositions and things—that is, expressed in a vocabulary, or lexis, for “states of affairs.” Building on philosophers from the Stoics through Baruch Spinoza to Nietzsche, Deleuze provides a compelling case for understanding truth as a problematic through which we structure public feelings. He also enables a view of nonsense as a creative animus for the construction of “falsehoods” that nevertheless feel true. While many scholars have studied affect as affectus— an emotional state, physical condition, embodied influence, feeling, and so

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on—I also look at affect as an affectation: a display, pretense, or false impression that shows itself in the rhetorical effects of truth and lies on public conduct. Hence the critical import of the aforementioned hashtag and its illustration of a certain threshold in the broader discourse of “post-truth” politics, and the controversy over Kyl as an occasion to gesture toward other instances in which lie detection signals the potential consequences of political distortion. Colbert’s lampoon of Kyl remains a key moment in which illogical or nonsensical expressions reflect a public and its problems with truth. Ultimately, this essay troubles digital technologies like Twitter in particular, but also (new) media in general, as a medium for wit, whim, and the “affective production” of truth. 22 It also takes on the rhetorical force of “truthiness” to consider how certain comic forms might recalibrate how we understand the politico-cultural conditions of truth and its consequences. TRUTHINESS One weekend in March 2012, an assemblage of journalists, legal scholars, pundits, hackers, whistleblowers, and advocacy organizations converged onto Cambridge for a conference, entitled Truthiness in Digital Media. The event was co-sponsored by Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the MIT Center for Civic Media, and professed to interrogate the twenty-first-century problematics of misrepresentation, information overload, partisanship, bias, and codes of ethics, not to mention the role of humor in trans-media environments. In short, the symposium sought to recover the Lippmannesque credo of The Society of Professional Journalists: “To Seek Truth and Report It.” Parodic neo-conservative and faux pundit Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness” in 2005 to identify the emotional and selfish quality of perceived realities, which are derived from passionate preferences rather than scientific, logical, or even journalistic certainties—or, in Brian Massumi’s words, a logic of “gut feelings” and “affectively legitimated fact(s).” 23 The American Dialect Society named “truthiness” the word of the year (MerriamWebster followed suit in 2006), 24 and the neologism was soon legitimated in numerous dictionaries as “the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than . . . [those] known to be true.” 25 Despite its soft façade, “truthiness” represents a hard line between belief and knowledge. It also recalls an Orwellian paranoia about doublethink (which seems to align with groupthink in the new media environment), and thereby a confused field of truth claims that alternates between false impressions and willful trades of complicated truths for constructed lies. Furthermore, “felt” truths have given way to so-called “Internet truth” (in contradistinction to “journalistic truth”), more information but less fidelity, and what Eric Alter-

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man, Ralph Keyes, and others now call an arena of “post-truth politics.” In tandem is a sort of rational emotivism and, contra Frederic Jameson, a waxing of affect. Though some have traced the etymology of “truthiness” through the Oxford English Dictionary and to the 1800s (a time when it actually indicated truthfulness), the term emerged largely out of Colbert’s rampant castigation of the George W. Bush administration. 26 It also came with a cluster of other terms, including “factinista,” “wordinista” (or “word police”), and “no fact zone,” each one reinforcing and even reifying the other. In 2005, truthiness formed the premise of The Colbert Report. By 2008, vast cohorts, from pundits to social commentators to psychologists, were adducing truthiness as endemic to twenty-first-century US public culture, erga omnes. Some, for instance, speak of “red” facts and “blue” facts (in a sort of Dr. Seuss burlesque). The year 2012 saw a rise of “Romnesia,” the outcome of what the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman called the “post-truth campaign,” 27 or what others have called the “caricature campaign” 28 carried out by Republicans Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. In fact, Ryan’s speech at the 2012 Republican National Convention led many commentators to pronounce “the end of political truth.” 29 James Fallows of the Atlantic held journalists just as responsible: “When significant political players are willing to say things that flat-out are not true—and when they’re not slowed down by demonstrations of their claims’ falseness—then reporters who stick to hesaid, she-said become accessories to deception.” 30 Fallows’s indictment of so-called “post-truth journalism” bespeaks what Jeremy Holden has deemed a problem of “the entire news media,” 31 which has all but repudiated its accountability to public opinion. It also highlights a more salient politics of falsification that Neil Newhouse, a lead pollster for the Romney-Ryan campaign, summed up when he refused to let “the campaign be dictated by factcheckers.” 32 One consequence has been an all-out media war over false equivalences. But lest we forget an important aspect of Colbert’s neologism: the suffix –iness. Stanford University linguist Arnold Zwicky calls it “the Colbert suffix,” 33 pointing to its role as a ridiculous qualifier that nonetheless resonates with the condition of truth that it simultaneously purports to measure. It is telling that with the 2012 campaign came the institutional fetish with factchecking, which has evolved into an unadulterated giddiness for things like “falsehood face-offs.” 34 Burdens of facticity lie at the root of classical conceptions of truth as correspondence between information and actualities. But so do impressions. As Colbert told Charlie Rose in December 2006, truthiness gets at the idea of “gut feelings” as measures of certainty, as catalysts of in-formation. Information constitutes patterns—bits of knowledge, for instance, in form—that organize experience. Affectively, public knowledge is as much a matter of expression as it is a collection of facts. Truth is not

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facticity. It is feeling, or the “sharing of form [that] comprises information” in “the organization or communication of relationships.” 35 Truthiness organizes affect, shaping judgments based on a pervasive sense that “all unwanted facts [are] political, uncertain, and equally debatable.” 36 As such, truthiness is not only a felt quality but also a state(ment) or expression of affairs. It is a measure, by which the important suffix–iness describes as a stasis and, in a rhetorical sense, an instability that disrupts even as it underlines the status quo. So it begs a question about what to do with the proverbial truism that we believe what we want to believe. If we know to be true what we want or feel to be true, then this question is particularly troubling when we imagine that the logic of nonsense, or of nonsensical truth, is an affective sense of reasoning insofar as it relies on the formal and even fervid ways of conveying thoughts and feelings—and, yes, even facts. One such mode of affectation is crowdsourcing. Participants at the Truth in Digital Media conference tentatively celebrated the power of crowds for “recognizing and rejecting patterns of deception.” 37 Nonsense expresses or exposes such patterns insofar as it displays the limits of ordinary speech. 38 Then again, the very idea that nonsense (or deception) can be simply detected and described follows the well-worn path of American pragmatism to affix truth “to our experiences of that thing and to our conversation about and collective understanding of it.” 39 Such pragmatism begets optimism, perhaps expressed most extremely by James Surowiecki in The Wisdom of Crowds, even as it ignores the element of trust in everyday communication. However, ascriptions in the digital media conference to a collective will of the Web were tempered by the pessimism of industry executives and intellectuals who “described a media landscape where roving bots produce near-human conversation on Twitter, where citizens cluster in right- or left-wing echo chambers, and where measured, carefully presented debunking may only reinforce a falsehood because of quirks of human psychology.” 40 A central concern was that publics are formed by processual (re)productions of presumed truth, which depend upon the manner in which people are “in-formed.” The crisis of truth(iness) thrives, then, on predispositions toward distortion in the first instance even if objectivity is coveted “as the dominant ideal that legitimates knowledge and authority.” 41 Put differently, the matter of truthiness has to do with the affective force of truth effects. GUT-CHECKING TRUTH Deep as affective truth may be (“Trust your gut,” says Colbert), 42 it is expressed at the surface. The surface, according to Gilles Deleuze, is the space of discourse, and thus the plane of serial constructions of meaning. This surface is both conditioned and conditioning; and to the extent that it relies

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upon both propositions and sensations about events, it is (re)productive of what we might call surface affects. But from whence truth? To answer this question, a biography of the word is in order. Truth comes from the Old English tríewþ, meaning reliability, and the Old Norse, tryggð, connoting faith or confidence. Together, tríewþ and tryggð yield a sense of “truth” as a correspondence between “facts” and “reality,” and something akin to “religious” belief. That modern understandings of truth entail “true-to-life” appeals (or what Karl Popper might deem the least false verisimilitudes) and functional “truth-claims” to actuality (à la William James) is a layover from the ancients. 43 In the Platonic tradition, a fixation on the “accuracy of representations,” the fixity of “established principles,” and the feigned attempts to report something as it “really” is drives the desire for an Idea or Ideal. Immanuel Kant further establishes the requirement for a sense of correspondence of knowledge and things (or subjects) known, namely by affixing to them the diktat of moral judgments (i.e., the “universability test”). Moreover, the Western tradition by and large trusts logical structures of understanding, and accepts that truth production is a cognitive, if not deliberative, project. And it follows John Milton in his sense, expressed in Areopagitica, that truth and falsehood will forever grapple. Deleuze rejects the Platonic notion that truth is either beyond the phenomenal world or outside the realm of language per se (even as he demands that neither reason nor facts cannot be the ultimate arbiter or auditor of Truth). Every truth can also be a falsehood, depending on what is or is not “(un)concealed.” 44 Or, following Deleuze, “Truth is a matter of production, not adequation,” and “truth and falsehood [are] primarily affect problems.” 45 The consequence here is at least twofold: first, truths are not only constructed but performed; and second, truth cannot in itself be a sort of Cartesian solution (i.e., a telos). In Nietzsche’s terms, truth is “something that must be created and that gives a name to a process.” 46 The constructed and processual nature of truth is inconsistent with a simple logic of representation insofar as it concerns the ends to which truths and lies are touched, tried, and told. Deleuze provides an outline for these ideas most explicitly in The Logic of Sense, to which I now turn. At the center of The Logic of Sense is a tradition that conjoins Deleuze and thinkers from Baruch Spinoza through Nietzsche to Foucault (not to mention Henri Bergson and Jacques Derrida): Stoicism. The theory of Stoicism is predicated upon a “rigorous materialism that claims that only bodies exist.” 47 This is not to say that there is no mind; instead, it is a rebuttal to the transcendentalism that runs through so many Western philosophies of reason, rationality, and logic. These philosophies tend to elide a politics of consciousness that might implicate the affective quality of truth in embodied experiences. A body is a force, in Deleuze’s sense. It is not a fact of being.

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Similarly, a body of truths is a rhetorical force, not a sieve of facticity. Foucault argues similarly when he asserts that truth “is a thing of this world,” 48 as unstable as the bodies, gestures, discourses, and more that comprise its effects. This means that facts matter less than forces inasmuch as the truth or falsity of judgments express indices of a (collective) will. Spinoza came earlier in codifying this idea when he posited truth as “the standard of itself and of the false.” 49 Additionally, says Foucault, every body politic has “its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements.” 50 The flipside of this should be patent: if there is a “politics of truth” that combines a Stoic sense of truth as sense with the corporeality of lived experience, there is also a politics of falsehood that is driven by a human capacity for non-sense. This is precisely what motivates Deleuze’s logic of sense. Sense, in Deleuzian terms, has a complex relationship with truth. For example, Deleuze upholds “common sense” (generally, shared knowledge that is presumably known by all) and “good sense” (prudence predicated on wisdom and rational judgment) as two expressions signifying felt truths that are patent in both the bodies that perform them and the networks, technologies, institutions, and discourses through which they are mediated. As “conditions of truth,” these senses name relations between language and events (i.e., ways of being, or surface affects) via the expressible (the lekton, in Stoicism). These relations rely upon propositional circles that involve denotations, significations, and expressions, which combine to “[turn] brute fact into individuated significance, shared meaning into a singular effect, and manifestation . . . into a process of becoming.” 51 Yet, when “brute facts” replace the “rawness” of felt experience with raw data, and when “common/ good sense” supplants meaning (sens) as a medium for re-conditioning truth and lies, a naturalistic rationality emerges alongside moral goodness to produce repetition without difference. Deleuze argues that this is the very substance of cultural penchants to forestall alternative senses. So it is that he turns to nonsense as a site for imagining truth and falsity away from a “concern [for] simple designation[s], rendered possible by a sense which remains indifferent to it,” and toward a notion that any “relation between a proposition and what it designates must be established within sense itself.” 52 Nonsense is the creative animus for establishing a revitalized intimacy with events and expressions. To borrow from Colbert, it expresses a capacity to “feel” truth rather than “know” it in any pure, rational way. Colbert cites truthiness and its encouragement of gut reactions as a public bad. Nevertheless, there is a sense in which Colbert himself perpetuates truthiness as an imaginative enterprise, recasting political circumstances in paradoxical, often ridiculous terms—especially given that the condition of truth he critiques involves not only one who feels something to be true but also one who feels it

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to be true. It is the singularity to which Colbert stands opposed, and the selfish affectations that get attached to it. More and more, “truth” is something to be manipulated according to particular, even personalized, interests. “Rather than simply banning certain words or opinions outright,” says Eli Pariser, truth will “increasingly revolve around second-order censorship— the manipulation of curation, context, and the flow of information and attention.” 53 Events and expressions might therefore increasingly contradict common/good sense. This is revealing when compared to Deleuze’s opposition to the absence of sense, which is to stay his own resistance to cultural processes that stultify difference within a repetitive—or what Massumi might call an “iterative”— series. Nonsense is, prima facie, meaningless. However, consider that a nonsensical word like “frumious” is what Deleuze dubs a “portmanteau word” that carries the denotative form of “fuming” and “furious.” To be sure, “the entire word says its own sense,” but because of the relationship it maintains with “the sense of the other,” it is, ipso facto, nonsense. 54 Sense, in other words, is a condition of, and conditioned by, non-sense in that meaning (sens) requires a conceptual ground (fond) in order to, well, make sense. Nonsense is the disruption of this ground, and also its reason for being. Following Deleuze, it is both regressive (because it enacts a return, or a representation, of conditions) and disjunctive (because it expresses the aporias in so-called logical sense). This is why Deleuze ends up defining “truth” in terms of a “falsity appropriate to the non-sense that it implies.” 55 In this sense, “we always have as much truth as we deserve in accordance with the sense of what we say.” 56 This is not to reduce truth to language or representation alone. Rather, it is to orient us toward what Delezue calls “the power of the false”: 57 the artistic and rhetorical force of re-establishing a co-presence of constructed truths and their lived consequences. Given this conception of truth (and lies), is “truthiness” not something of a portmanteau word, conjoining conditions of truth with allusions to its affective apparatuses? And are words in Colbert’s broader cluster such as “factinista,” which nonsensically expresses facticity itself as a principle to be followed alongside the institutionalized settings of its production, not similarly expressive? Colbert expresses the surface considerations of our affective investments in truth as part and parcel of a sense of what matters. Additionally, he points implicitly to a Deleuzian notion of truth as that which “vivifies and alters a situation.” 58 After all, the excess of affect is a symptom of its antithesis to fixed mindsets, stubborn predispositions, and oppositions to the very idea that a particular view might make no sense. Truth emerges out of trans-formation, which interrupts and even irrupts in sense. It facilitates “a suspension of affect-reaction circuits,” 59 altering-by-falsifying a state(ment) of affairs. This is strikingly similar to what Raymond Williams refers to as the fabrication of “imaginative truths.” 60 It also bespeaks a sense

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that “the deliberate denial of factual truth—the ability to lie—and the capacity to change facts—the ability to act—are interconnected; they owe their existence to the same source: imagination.” 61 True: politics take place at the deep surfaces of collective constructions of “false” images, of fantasies. And, pragmatically speaking, such images are most constructively political when recognized for the extent to which truth collapses into the fantastical, 62 and when the lines between affective contents and contests over graspable textures of truthiness become blurry at best. POSTING LIES AND POSING AS TRUTH Deleuze describes humor as “the art of the surface.” 63 He also characterizes it as “the co-extensiveness of sense with nonsense.” 64 Considering that his primary concern in The Logic of Sense involves the effect of events that are themselves affected by alterations of perspective, the work of Lewis Carroll is more than apt as his central case study. Carroll, after all, is famous for using pseudo words (think of the poem “Jabberwocky”), crafting witty verses, as well as developing narratives that disrupt delimitations of surface and depth (e.g., Alice in Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass). Interestingly, just as Alice intones to herself, “what dreadful nonsense” 65 as she observes the words and deeds of others, one might also imagine the nonfactual world created by Colbert following the Planned Parenthood blunder carried out by Jon Kyl on April 8, 2011. Colbert is no stranger to wordplay, especially when engaging “artificially maintained controversies.” 66 In January 2012, for instance, he mocked Fox News pundits and Conservative radio hosts for accusing the Obama administration of covering up a 2009 Alice in Wonderland-themed Halloween party. Colbert framed the “scandal” as “Malice in Blunderland,” 67 then relayed how the cover-up was not, in fact, a cover-up, since the administration invited the White House press corps to the event and posted photos and videos on the government website. To “make sense” of the controversy, Colbert cited “Jabberwocky”: ‘Twas bryllyg, and ye slythy toves Did gyre and gymble in ye wabe: All mimsy were ye borogroves; And ye mome raths outgrabe.

Colbert’s nonsensical logic, on the one hand, gets closer to claims to political truths. On the other, it posits a ridiculous attitude as a realist one. Nine months prior, Colbert catalyzed “the power of the false” in a manner that circulated the rhetorical force means for “making sense” of “affective facticity,” 68 or a predispositional feeling for truth as correspondent with certain

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emotive judgments about what Bruno Latour calls “matters of concern,” 69 like faux political cover-ups. Aside from CNN’s report immediately following his statement and Time magazine’s eventual celebration of the senator’s lie about the extent to which Planned Parenthood subsidizes abortion, few news agencies attended very closely to Kyl’s remarks. Fewer still discussed the official disclaimer, in which Kyl expressed that his comment “was not intended to be a factual statement,” that is, until it was picked up by Colbert (and, in all fairness, fellow political comedian Jon Stewart). As Ellen Scolnic of Philly.com put it: “The Colbert Report and The Daily Show were the only programs covering the story.” 70 This was after Scholnic reported finding her fifteen-year-old son, Andy, playing games on his computer when he had indicated that he would be doing his homework. When she pushed him for an explanation of his claim, he replied with: “That was not intended to be a factual statement.” On April 13, 2011, Politico announced that Colbert was “keep[ing] Twitter heat on Kyl.” 71 The same day John Tomasic of The Colorado Independent converted what others called Colbert’s “Twitter campaign” into a “Twitter war” predicated upon “intentionally not factual politics.” 72 And countless other news agencies, columnists, pundits, and bloggers marked Colbert’s Twitter madness. Indeed, Colbert enacted what it might mean to “feel” the news and so his nonsense (and not Kyl’s lie) became the story—and this despite the sense in which Kyl’s non-factual statement was expressive of a seemingly rare instance of political honesty. Reflecting on Kyl’s truthiness, CNN Contributor John P. Avlon described “emotional truth as more important than literal truth. It creates a political tower of Babel.” 73 The biblical reference is apposite given the sense that misinformation can posit confusion as clarity, and processes of expressing falsehoods as inadvisable trips down so many rabbit holes. It is even more fitting in the context of Colbert’s Twitter posts, which began to crop up from @StephenAtHome on April 12, demonstrating truth as an adoptive stance, or a pretended perspective, and thus as a series of “states, moments, or periods of more or less vague or muted feeling, informed by and reflecting cultural values, institutions, and social hierarchies.” 74 Colbert, for instance, tweeted the following: 75 Jon Kyl sponsored S.410, which would ban happiness. Jon Kyl let a game-winning ground ball roll through his legs in Game 6 of the ‘86 World Series. Jon Kyl’s torso is covered in superfluous nipples. Jon Kyl is the only person who can sneeze with his penis. He calls it a “sneesis.” Jon Kyl once ate a badger he hit with his car. Jon Kyl thinks no one can see him when he puts a paper bag on his head. Jon Kyl can unhinge his jaw like a python to swallow small rodents whole.

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The list could go on—and on. Each tweet garnered multiple hundreds of retweets, and on April 14, Comedy Central’s Indecision declared the tweets an Internet meme, citing inspired mimicries from a Twitter community that used Colbert as a catalyst for performing a more proximate relationship to (the falsity of) truth claims. For example, in a Twitter post on April 14, 2011, @SherrieGG wrote “Jon Kyl inherited all of J. Edgar Hoover’s dresses,” while on the same day, @dryfoo claimed that “Sen Jon Kyl spams me daily with offers for discount trepanations.” Others suggested that “Jon Kyl has a velcro fetish” or that “Jon Kyl doesn’t see the irony in egging abortion protesters.” 76 Each tweet, either from Colbert or others, contained the hashtag #NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement. Some Democratic senators were also reiterating the sentiment, as when New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand assured her colleagues that her own remark about federal funding for abortions was a factual statement. 77 Today, a Twitter search reveals a rampant proliferation of the hashtag well beyond references to Kyl, who retired from the Senate in 2012. Surely there was, and perhaps still is, fun to be had in constituting a community through the distribution of nonsense. But it is worthwhile to consider whether Colbert’s ruse poses more than a sense of truth as the repetition of lies. The “truth” about Kyl—and the “truthiness” in his expressions—became through Colbert’s tweets the truth-be-told of the very systems and schemes of commensuration that sanction sociopolitical values as outcomes of disputes over facticity. The question, for Colbert, is not whether “truth” gets distorted, but rather how it gets distorted, and why. It is about “the [affective and rhetorical] forces of untruth” 78 that make strong feelings as sources of cultural standards for perspectives, judgments, and truth-values themselves. As such, Colbert’s stories are neither true nor false; they are affectations that cannot exist irrespective of (mis)perceptions, (mis)information, or altered states of affairs. Truth, in this sense, is the denuded report, the discrepancy, the incongruity—the distortion. Or better, truth itself is a falsification (of other, “established” accounts), a lie of lies. At least one ethical implication here has to do with the ways in which politically motivated truth claims are circulated through a body politic. Colbert seems to affect a sense in which certain truths are willed into or out of public existence in accordance with crude, if not stubborn, allegiances. Colbert earned his notoriety for lambasting the press corps and political officials without remorse, sometimes coarsely propagating “fake” news and embodying the ostensibly institutionalized practice of lying by telling the truthiness. Truth is not illusion, in the Nietzschean sense; it is delusion. And with every lie, Colbert recasts the cultural truth-telling code of ethics as a truthy “misrecognition of the political logics . . . organizing the world,” 79 and so, a

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mischaracterization of the conditions of truth. Truth, following this logic, is both embedded in and exceeds value systems and actualities, the openings and closures of access to feelings about facts, and the content controls that work to process, store, transmit, and represent “reality.” As such, Colbert’s truthiness attaches many a true word not only to jest but also to authority, to received systems of its production, and thus to the limits of a bare necessity for the “truth” and nothing but, so help us. So, too, does he instigate processes of making sense through nonsensical engagements with rhetorical artifacts of political culture. These instigations rupture the organization of affect as a production of the “meaningful,” the “knowable,” and the “livable.” 80 They also demonstrate the extent to which nonsense creates the grounds of sense—of meaning, of claims to truth or falsity, and thus to lived experiences. By injecting himself into the system and therefore outside of his own political box, 81 as it were, Colbert over and again reenacts the potential for public consequences that exceed the confines of a particular media apparatus. Nonsense, as truthiness, thereby reveals relations, and here are some of their affectations: governmentality is a neoliberal art of gobbledygook; audiences of Big Media are fact-checkers of fools in the low courts of public opinion; and the art of lying underscores a puerile politics of truth that calls hokum a problem only when the hoodwinker is caught. Nonsense can therefore alter both perceptions and states of affairs through wild distortions. Consider Colbert’s commonplace affectations that emerge out of his assumption of a “false,” pretentious character; the dizzying videographic intros that comprised the opening credits of The Colbert Report; the outrageous references and assemblages of words, images, and ideas that Colbert introduced in any given episode; his “real world” exploits (e.g., his 2010 testimony before Congress, his Super PAC ads, his campaign for president of South Carolina, and more); and the overarching madcap approach that he takes to political commentary. Then there are his writings—such as 2007’s I Am America (And So Can You!) and 2012’s America Again: ReBecoming the Greatness We Never Weren’t—which, with vast and varied expressions of political delirium, envelop readers in disorientations so characteristic of Carroll’s work. The point: nonsense deals in expressions of how and why truths and lies run through systems, institutions, discourses, political bodies, and bodies politic. It is a comic affectation of the dispositions associated with words and ideas, and their sociopolitical disorganization. CONCLUSION: THE TEXTURE OF TRUTH Colbert’s Twitter campaign against Kyl, and his wider nonsensical antics besides, expresses a sense in which many of “the old arbiters” of truth are

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unfit in the “increasingly disaggregated media ecosystem.” 82 A so-called “post-truth” era, then, does much less to inaugurate a condition of untruth than it does to name—as did the neologism “truthiness”—a changing set of relations in the organization of truth and lies. Additionally, with these relationalities there has emerged an odd dynamic of communication, circulation, and regulation as protocols of truth production. 83 This is not to say that “old” arbitrations cease to exist. 84 However, it is to say that cultural expressions of truth and lies are immanent to institutional machineries, both of which affect and are affected by one another. It is therefore less the case that mechanisms for determining truth are absent referees than it is that they are sublimated within deeper cultural practices of, in this case, circulating public sentiment. In this light, I conclude with a brief reflection on the “vitality of language” as it is emergent in the “different formations and distributions of energy and interest” 85 relative to the textures—or the feelings and structures—of truth that seem to betray a need for more and more nonsense, and more and more affectations of its surfaces, or its truthiness. I begin with Donald Trump. From the outset of his 2016 presidential bid, the real estate tycoon was widely recognized for his cavalier relationship with truth. This relationship even earned him the reputation as a walking, talking prototype of truthiness. 86 It also won him the position as GOP frontrunner, and this despite what many called his vicious, bigoted, and hateful rhetoric. 87 In fact, there is a strong case to be made that Trump—not unlike Colbert—gained popularity because of the “topsy-turvy, truthy” political milieu he exhibited. 88 Belief over accuracy, egomaniacal insults over honest ideas, politics as resolute anti-politics: these are but some of the tenets of the Age of Truthiness. Unfortunately, these are the very tenets that underlie a mass shooting that took place at a Planned Parenthood clinic on November 27, 2015, in Colorado Springs, which countless citizens, commentators, and public officials alike attributed to the “hateful rhetoric” of ireful pro-lifers. Trump dismissed the notion that incendiary or inflammatory language can incite violence, no doubt because his own brand of truthiness is akin to the same moral enmity that contributes to a cultural politics of truth and consequences, of false accounts and harsh punishments. The hook here is not that truth and feeling are somehow separate but rather that they are as interlocked as they are in tension with one another. In this sense, affective leanings toward things like anguish, disgust, resentment, and other ill feelings can be the sources, and not simply the outcomes, of so many grapples between truth and lies. There is thus a problem with the prevailing delusion that truthiness is comparable to facticity. As Edward Schiappa notes, truth has never been a matter of correspondences between, say, rhetoric and reality; instead, it has been constituted by a shared sense that expressions of “interrelated beliefs, values, and concepts” are somehow appropriate given the political, cultural,

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and other orders of the day. 89 Put differently, what matters is how truths are used and expressed, not what they “really” are. The paradox is that one can lie and still be honest, showing forth a truth deeper and more complex than that caught in the ostensive conflict between fact and fiction. This truth is an affectation of felt verity, and it does more to display the textures of truth and lies (i.e., the feel of their appearance in public communication, their basis in political structures, their grating characteristics, their fabrication) than any test of reality as such. What is more, while this form of affective truth might indicate unethical or even ignorant bluster at best and, at worst, what Foucault might call a “crisis of democratic institutions” (or “bad politics”), it also serves as a vital reminder that correspondence itself can be a clever deception. As even Jürgen Habermas admits, truth is only as good as it is an organ of publicity. 90 At stake here is a sense that there is no such thing as unforced truth. Following Deleuze, truth is deeply embedded in the rhetorical forces of public life, and thus the manner in which certain conditions of truth take hold (or not). But to get at the textures of “deep truths” is not to dwell on discursive frameworks at the expense of a profound appreciation for the depths of feeling. 91 Instead, it is to see truth as felt, not as framed. It is to see facticity as fabulated, not as tested. What truthiness exposes is that the biggest lie we can tell ourselves has to do with the idea that truths are somehow at a remove from either expressions or experiences. In this sense, #NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement is actually an intensely textured statement about how truth and lies exist in the relations that sustain cultural politics or tear them asunder. To bring the rhetorical force of feeling (over facticity) to the fore, in other words, is to bring the real matters of concern—that is, the common sets of perceptions and values, and the forms of foreknowledge and predispositions, however (non)sensical they might be—to the surface. Here is where the twain of sense and nonsense meet: in the particular logic to truthiness. Of course, its own truth lies in the fact that truthy affectations are, in situ, pathologies, which is to say expressions of experiences or feelings. Truthiness, at base, provides a site for considering the organs of provisional truths, and I mean provisional in the rhetorical sense such that affect is the proviso and affectations are the logia of how and why truths are touched, touching, and, ultimately, tampered with. In these ways, while many theorists and thinkers have pointed to concepts of postmodernism and antiessentialism as fodder for the love of lies, they have also advanced a misrecognition of the loss of Truth for its reconfiguration. Figures like Derrida, Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and others provide a complex logic for abandoning notions of truth that rely upon accurate representations. And figures like Richard Rorty advocate for abandoning notions of truth altogether. But within the express politics behind claims to Truth’s impurity is a historical transition that “has to do with a change not so much in what we

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believe as in how we believe.” 92 For my part, the proclaimed transition to “post-truth politics” is not about moving beyond Truth, but rather delving deeper into its political expression. To push on Deleuze’s own logic, recent pursuits of truth are not only (perhaps more than ever) caught up in the paradigm of mapping statements onto claims to fact and reality, but they are also striking at the branches of a social problem that has nonsensical roots. From a “logical” perspective, political truth has less to do with what the truth “is” than how it is made so. It is a matter of why lies matter within particular “regimes of political truth” 93 and “structures of reputation and/or credibility.” 94 Some might conceive as nonsensical the very idea that certain machinations could determine truth or control which truths are made accessible (or not). Once they become codeterminant and thereby co-extensive, though, there is perhaps new meaning ascribed to a notion of truth by design. Such a truth seems to belie a politics of saving face. This is not to say that dissemblance and deception are goods in themselves. It is to say, though, that there are potential social and political dangers that come with “naked accountability” across the board. 95 Colbert denudes the pretense of pure and simple truth; then again, he also sheds the notion of a pure and simple lie. In so doing, he demonstrates nonsense as an effect of false appearances, and yet an affectively organized cause of particular modes of understanding. To be fair, some turns to the wisdom of crowds indicate that the boundaries between truth as authored and truth as authorized (or even authenticated) are unstable at best. Colbert reveals the crowd as it is affected by political distortion. There is a difference, in other words, between the commercially interested deployment of truth claims and the collective consequences embedded in conditions of truth production. The difference with Colbert’s nonsense and, say, much of the twaddle of political talk is that the former restores an anti-common sense to the surface of political speech in the form of humor. Colbert lies all the time. Yet, as evidenced in the proliferation of #NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement, his lies affect truth while putting on display the effects that organized lies have as material impressions. In a popular sense, Colbert contributes to the reorganization of public relations to truth and lies by subjecting content controls to nonsensical twists. He creates, a la Alice, a world of nonsense, and in so doing troubles the technologies for managing perceptions, perspectives, and interpretations. Tellingly, though Deleuze viewed humor as an artful means of bringing matters of affect to the surface, he also saw it as a simultaneous way to return them to their depths. Truthiness is therefore diabolical because it posits truth as the emptiest of signifiers, waiting not for discursive content but rather for feeling.

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NOTES 1. Jacobson, “Jon Kyl Says Abortion Services Are ‘Well Over 90 Percent of What Planned Parenthood Does.’” This would be in the congressional record from April 8, 2011, but as I discuss below, his comment has been expunged. 2. “CNN: ‘Not Intended to Be a Factual Statement.’” 3. Collins, “Behind the Abortion War,” para 3. 4. Benen, “Not Intended to be a Factual Statement,” para. 6. 5. Bierce, The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary, 77. 6. Colbert, “Pap Smears at Walgreens,” 2:53–2:56. 7. Colbert, “Jon Kyl Tweets,” 2:02–2:04. 8. Ibid., 2:07–2:11. 9. Ibid., 2:43–2:47. 10. Following Mark Peters, author of Bullshit: A Lexicon, “The uses that don’t mention Colbert are the best indicators of [truthiness’] success”: “Truthiness: BS Gets a Colbert Bump,” Slate, November 6, 2015, http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2015/11/06/ mark_peters_bullshit_word_of_the_day_truthiness_gets_a_colbert_bump.html. 11. Huppke, “Facts, 360 B.C.–A.D. 2012.” 12. Zelizer, “When Facts, Truth, and Reality Are God-Terms.” 13. Brisbane, “Should the Times Be a Truth Vigilante?” 14. Roberts, “As Romney and Ryan Lie with Abandon,” para. 13. 15. The story here extends from the forecasts of political elections created by sabermetrician, Nate Silver to the Washington Post’s “Truth Teller” application that combines video and audio extraction technologies with speech-to-text capabilities to check facts in real time. And lurking within these types of programs for uncovering truth are impulses to embed standards thereof in technologies of algorithmic judgment, simultaneously enabling cultural industries to capitalize on sense-making protocols that modulate (truth) values according to axioms no better than supply and demand. At least one potential result is a false equivalence of thoughts, bodies, knowledge, and action that simply reaffirms the need for absentee referees “disguised” as systems of authentication. Truth, then, is not de-valued but rather over-valued, with the emphasis on its expenditure or surplus in an act of consumption as opposed to its creation in an expressive constitution of publics and publicity. 16. Peters, Courting the Abyss, 251. 17. Williams, Keywords, 15.

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18. Ibid., 12. 19. Bennett, Grossberg, and Morris, “Introduction,” xvii. 20. Massumi, Semblance and Event, 37. 21. Gleick, The Information, 76. 22. See Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This, 69–88; and Grossberg, Cultural Studies in the Future Tense, 169–226. 23. Massumi, “The Future Birth of the Affective Fact,” 55, 54. 24. “2006 Word of the Year,” Merriam-Webster. 25. “Truthiness Voted 2005 Word of the Year,” para. 1. 26. For a vernacular etymology, see Zimmer, “Truthiness.” 27. Krugman, “The Post-Truth Campaign.” 28. Kinsley, “Obama, Romney Running a Caricature Campaign.” 29. Corn, “Campaign 2012”; see also the work of Andrew Beaujon of Poynter, http:// www.poynter.org/author/abeaujon/, and David Corn of Mother Jones, http:// www.motherjones.com/authors/david-corn. 30. Fallows, “Bit by Bit It Takes Shape,” para. 2. 31. Holden, “The Washington Post and the Emergence of Post-Truth Journalism,” para. 4. 32. Bennet, “We’re Not Going to Let Our Campaign Be Dictated.” 33. Sullivan, “Thingyness,” para. 1. 34. Drobnic Holan, “All Politicians Lie,” para. 10. 35. Gibbs, “After Affect: Sympathy, Synchrony, and Mimetic Communication,” 194. 36. Banning, “When Poststructural Theory and Contemporary Politics Collide,” 293. 37. Hall Jamieson, “Recognizing and Rejecting Patterns of Deception.” 38. Lecercle, Philosophy of Nonsense. 39. Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything, 61. 40. Schorow, “Sorting Reality from ‘Truthiness,’” para. 5. 41. Schudson, Discovering the News, 10. 42. This was one of Colbert’s catchphrases. He said it frequently on his show, as well as at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, April 29, 2006. 43. Plato and Aristotle grounded a concept of truthful judgment in the conformity of words and reality. Saint Thomas Aquinas later interpreted this to mean “the equation of things and intellect”—an interpretation that filtered into rationalistic thinking, logical positivism, and, in time, journalistic codes of ethics. 44. Martin Heidegger defined truth as “unconcealment,” borrowing from the ancient Greek word of aletheia to suggest that what is true is what is disclosed. There is much more to his definition than this, and those interested should see Being and Time (1927). My purpose in noting the expositive notion of Heidegerrian truth is to highlight that fact that while Deleuze is also interested in disclosure, the expressivity in his sense of truth is not so much revelatory as it is generative. Put differently, truth for Deleuze is about the reproduction of procreant affects and effects, not simply their revelation. Ideas are therefore problems, and not just bases for political, cultural, or other forms of being, which means that a truth predicated upon the dynamic of sense and nonsense is oriented toward an axiology, or even a pathology, rather than an ontology. 45. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 200. 46. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 552. 47. Sellars, Stoicism, 155. 48. Foucault, “Truth and Power,” 73. 49. Spinoza, Ethics, 82. 50. Foucault, “Truth,” 73. 51. Williams, “Community Beyond Instrumental Reason,” 107. 52. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 192. 53. Pariser, The Filter Bubble, 141. 54. Deleuze, Logic, 67. 55. Deleuze, Difference, 193. 56. Ibid. 57. Deleuze, Cinema II: The Time-Image, chapter 6.

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58. Williams, “Truth,” 289. 59. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 28. 60. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 50. 61. Arendt, “Lying in Politics,” 5. 62. Zamberlin, “Between Gilles Deleuze and William James,” 25. 63. Deleuze, Logic, 9. 64. Ibid., 141. 65. Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 194. 66. Sahlins, “Artificially Maintained Controversies.” 67. Colbert, “Malice in Blunderland.” 68. Massumi, “The Future Birth of the Affective Fact.” 69. Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?” 70. Scolnic, “If More People Practiced Truthiness,” para 5. 71. Epstein and Tanabe, “Colbert Keeps Twitter Heat on Kyl.” 72. Tomasic, “Colbert Wages Twitter War on Kyl-Style Intentionally Not Factual Politics.” 73. Avlon, “Colbert vs. Kyl and Spread of ‘Misinformation,’” para 9. 74. Clarke, “The Public and Its Affective Problems,” 382. 75. “Stephen Colbert Rips on Jon Kyl with #NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement hashtag.” 76. Tweetsfromabyss, “John Kyl.” 77. Linkins, “Kirsten Gillibrand Takes Shot at Jon Kyl.” 78. Waldenfels, “Dialogue and Discourses,” 166. 79. Brown, Politics Out of History, 29. 80. I borrow these terms from Lawrence Grossberg. 81. Jones, Baym, and Day, “Mr. Stewart and Mr. Colbert Go to Washington.” 82. Cooper, “Campaigns Play Loose With Truth in a Fact-Check Age,” para. 7. 83. Galloway, Protocol. 84. Consider for instance that by April 15, 2011, just one week after Kyl’s senatorial speech, the figure that was “not intended to be factual” was expunged from the congressional record. 85. Williams, Keywords, 21, 11. For a discussion of texture and affect, see also Sedgwick and Barale, Touching Feeling. 86. Obeidallah, “Donald Trump’s Pants Are on Fire.” 87. A small sampling will yield remarks involving Trump’s call for a ban on Muslims entering the United States, his insults of female public figures, his condemnations of Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists, and more. 88. Domke, “Commentary.” 89. Schiappa, Defining Reality, 43. 90. Habermas, The Structural Transformation, 177–180. 91. Lakoff, “Why It Matters.” 92. Anderson, “What’s Going On Here?” 2. 93. Vivian, “Freedom, Naming, Nobility,” 390. 94. Lessig, Code, 242. 95. Greenfield, Everyware, 240.

Chapter Seven

Motivated to Ignore the Facts The Inability of Fact-Checking to Promote Truth in the Public Sphere Jeffrey W. Jarman

A vibrant public sphere, where individuals are informed and engaged in public deliberation on the pressing issues of the day, is a pre-requisite to a healthy democracy. This ideal version of the public sphere has been articulated by a wide range of scholars. As Lasswell noted decades ago, “democracy depends on talk.” 1 Similarly, Dahlgren explained, “Talk is seen as constitutive of publics and is thus both morally and functionally vital for democracy. In that sense, the basic idea of deliberative democracy is as old as democracy itself.” 2 A vibrant public sphere, then, “is the conceptual place where the nation confronts problems and chooses how to react to those problems.” 3 But, not just any talk will do. Citizens must be reasonably informed about the issues in order to participate meaningfully. “The role of the public is to pay attention to the debate and gather enough information to make a sensible judgment about whatever issue is under consideration.” 4 But, the ideal vision of a lively dialogue among interested and engaged citizens is not the only view of democratic life. In sharp contrast are those who reject the ideal of the “informed citizen” as unrealistic 5 and instead argue that citizens operate under a “low-information rationality” and make political decisions on the basis of easy to use heuristics. 6 This chapter investigates the discrepancy between the normative ideal of public sphere rooted in rational deliberation and the reality of the public sphere driven by other factors. Political fact-checking provides an excellent test of how the public responds to competing facts: Will they update their opinions on the basis of new information or will they stridently maintain 115

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their opinions, even when challenged? This chapter proceeds by first, reviewing the relevant literature on fact-checking and motivated reasoning; second, reporting the results on two studies; and finally, drawing conclusions based on the findings. TRUTH, FACT-CHECKING, AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE The ideal version of the public sphere is premised on rationality and a belief that citizens will update their opinions through “reflection and thoughtfulness about public policy.” 7 In this characterization, “citizens must then use these facts to inform their preferences. They must absorb and apply the facts to overcome areas of ignorance or to correct mistaken conceptions.” 8 This perspective is consistent with simple Bayesian updating which suggests “two groups of Bayesian learners exposed to the same set of information should inexorably come to see the world in the same way.” 9 In other words, the public sphere constitutes citizens as dispassionate decision makers where “people make decisions by weighing the available evidence and reaching conclusions that make the most sense of the data.” 10 For rationalists, there is no room for emotion, which “must be kept out.” 11 The vision of a cool and unemotional citizenry, actively acquiring and processing information in order to reach consensus on the pressing issues of the day, is an ideal. Does the reality of the public sphere match this ideal? There is no shortage of information available to the public on major issues facing the country. But, when information is available to the public, what does it do with the information it receives? “How citizens form their opinions and come to their policy preferences is an integral part of a theory of deliberative democracy.” 12 The biggest challenge to the normative theory of the public sphere articulated so far is the cognitive ability of the public. Setting aside the question of whether individuals engage in selective exposure to counterattitudinal information, what happens when the public is confronted with information directly related to their prior opinions? Political fact-checking provides an excellent test of how the public responds to competing information. Fact-checking began in earnest in the 1990s as journalists reacted to a wave of negative, and misleading, political advertising in the United States. The early ad watches were designed to call attention to political ads that were deceptive. “Ad watches are premised on the assumption that prospective voters will use information about misleading ads to discount their claims and turn away from candidates whose ads lack veracity.” 13 Since then, there has been a dramatic increase in the amount of fact-checking. Kessler described a “global boom” 14 in fact-checking. As many as eighty-nine fact-checking websites around the world have recently been active, with sixty-four currently active. 15

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Fact-checking serves an important role in promoting an informed discussion in the public sphere since it is designed to provide nonpartisan assessments of political information. Moreover, organized fact-checking provides a bridge between the ideal of an informed citizenry and the reality of the challenges to acquiring reliable information. Non-partisan fact-checking organizations do the difficult work of sorting truth and falsehoods for the public. They invest the time and energy required to determine which claims are true and which are misleading leaving the public only to digest their conclusions. Fact-checking, then, facilitates the ideal of an informed citizenry debating the merits of competing policy options in the public sphere while acknowledging that the public may not have the time, energy, or resources to learn the information on their own. Informed citizens must only be aware of the fact-check conclusion in order to engage productively in the public sphere. While fact-checking has the ability to contribute to the public sphere, the results to date have been mixed. Early research on ad watches was inconclusive. Some studies found support for the intended goal of ad watches. 16 Yet, other studies found mixed results 17 or concluded that “ad-watch journalism evidently fails to achieve its basic objectives” since it “reinforce[s] the sponsoring candidates’ messages.” 18 Recent research on fact-checking also has produced inconclusive results. On the one hand, Gottfried et al. found “the responses of those who went to a fact-checking website during the general election were significantly more accurate than were the responses of those who did not.” 19 Garrett, Nisbet, and Lynch documented “that a typical participant exposed to the fact-checking message was inclined to reject the false claim.” 20 Similarly, Fridkin, Kenney, and Wintersieck reported “people’s views of the accuracy of the advertisements are influenced by their exposure to the fact-check” and concluded “fact-checks are effective at influencing people’s views regarding the veracity of the commercials.” 21 However, other studies have found fact-checking less effective at reducing misperceptions. Jarman found that fact-checking did not result in a convergence of opinion on the topic, but rather significant differences of opinion remained even after exposure to a fact-check. 22 This project is designed to further our understanding of the influence of political fact-checking on the public. MOTIVATED REASONING The lofty ideal of the public sphere casts citizens as cool and unemotional when evaluating political information. However, the hot cognition hypothesis challenges the classic distinction between reason and emotion. The hot cognition hypothesis suggests “all sociopolitical concepts are affect laden.” 23 Political concepts, including individuals and issues, “become affectively

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charged—positively or negatively—and this affect is linked directly to the concept in long-term memory.” 24 The concepts and the affective association remain in long-term memory (LTM) until needed by working memory (WM). As soon as a political concept is invoked, directly or through an association, the information (and affect) in long-term memory becomes activated and is available to be used by working memory. 25 Political information is therefore imbued with both rational and affective content. Motivated reasoning provides a direct challenge to the normative ideal of rationality embedded within the public sphere. Motivated reasoning, known also as a prior attitude effect, 26 an attitude congruency bias, 27 biased assimilation, 28 and belief perseverance, 29 suggests citizens often will engage in biased processing of information to justify an opinion they already hold. Instead of engaging in a rational evaluation of information, “people who feel strongly about an issue . . . will evaluate supportive arguments as stronger and more compelling than opposing arguments.” 30 Biased processing of information influences evaluations of information that is both attitude consistent and attitude inconsistent. Individuals will “judge confirming evidence as relevant and reliable but disconfirming evidence as irrelevant and unreliable.” 31 An extensive body of research in social psychology and political science has documented the role of motivated reasoning in the processing of political information. 32 On occasion, citizens might be driven by “accuracy goals, which motivate them to seek out and carefully consider relevant evidence so as to reach a correct or otherwise best conclusion.” 33 More often, motivated reasoning suggests that citizens will be driven by “partisan goals, which motivate them to apply their reasoning powers in defense of a prior, specific conclusion.” 34 Motivated reasoning is more likely since “all sociopolitical concepts are affect laden.” Political affiliation provides a strong source of motivation when evaluating political information. “Political beliefs about controversial factual questions in politics often are closely linked with one’s ideological preferences or partisan beliefs.” 35 Motivated reasoning provides a direct challenge to the possibility of a vibrant public sphere and to the utility of political information fact-checking. The normative ideal suggests that citizens should update their opinions on the basis of new, and especially accurate, information. But, motivated reasoning suggests that people have a cognitive interest in avoiding this result. While several studies have found a pervasive influence of motivated reasoning in the evaluation of political fact-check information, 36 the results have not been uniform. 37 This project will investigate the role of political affiliation in promoting the partisan evaluation of political information. While partisan goals are common when evaluating political information, it may be possible to minimize the influence of motivated reasoning. Overt references to political affiliation (or other partisan cues) may encourage the

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motivated processing of political information. It is not surprising, therefore, that some have called to “reduce partisan and ideological cues.” 38 Removing the partisan cue, such as the source of the statement, should minimize the influence of motivated reasoning. Boddery and Yates found a messenger effect whereby the author of a Supreme Court decision influenced the level of agreement with the opinion. 39 Similarly, Druckman, Peterson, and Slothuus found divergent reactions to competing frames based on the existence of a partisan cue. 40 When there was no partisan cue, the strong frame trumped the weak frame regardless of issue or political affiliation. But, under conditions of partisan polarization, “partisans ignore the substance of the frame and follow their party.” 41 This project will investigate the role of source cues as a means to promote debiasing when evaluating political information. In addition, the level of prior knowledge may influence the evaluation of political information. On the one hand, citizens with prior knowledge of the topic likely have developed associational networks that contain affective information. Recent research on fact-checking provides some support for this idea. Garrett, Nisbet, and Lynch found “the frequency of exposure to the false statement prior to beginning the experiment was also a positive predictor [of accepting the false statement], though its effect was smaller.” 42 In other words, prior exposure to the statement made people more resistant to the correction in the fact-check. But, they also found that exposure to the rebuttal prior to the experiment reduced the likelihood that a participant would accept the false statement. 43 On the other hand, prior knowledge could function to increase acceptance of false information. There is a risk that “repeating misinformation in order to discredit it can enhance its perceived truth.” 44 since repetition “may contribute to its later familiarity and acceptance.” 45 In addition, prior knowledge of a claim may function as forewarning and enable greater resistance to persuasion. “Because of the prior consideration, people may have a greater ability or may be more practiced in defending their beliefs. This would reduce susceptibility to counterattitudinal appeals.” 46 This project will investigate the influence of prior knowledge on evaluations of political information. Finally, the nature of the fact-check conclusion should influence the public’s reaction to the political information. Strong corrections, with definitive conclusions about the truth or falsity of the statement, ought to encourage the public to abandon misinformation. As Kuklinski et al. noted, the facts can be persuasive when they are presented to the public “in a way that ‘hits them between the eyes.’” 47 In contrast, weak corrections are less effective and risk increasing belief polarization. 48 This project will investigate the influence of the fact-check conclusion on evaluations of political information. On the basis of this review, this project investigates the following research questions:

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RQ1: Will the initial evaluation of a political message differ based on political affiliation, source of the statement, and/or prior knowledge of the topic? RQ2: Will the evaluation of the fact-check criticism differ based on political affiliation, source of the statement, fact-check conclusion and/or prior knowledge of the topic? RQ3: Will the final evaluation of a political statement subjected to a factcheck criticism differ based on political affiliation, source of the statement, fact-check conclusion, and/or prior knowledge of the topic? RQ4: Will the change in evaluation of a political statement subjected to a fact-check criticism differ based on political affiliation, source of the statement, fact-check conclusion, and/or prior knowledge of the topic? STUDY 1 Method Participants Participants (N = 251) were recruited from Amazon’s online labor service Mechanical Turk to complete an online survey (in exchange for $1.00). Mechanical Turk is a reliable online labor market for academic research. 49 The service has been successfully used in prior research on fact-checking. 50 Participants ranged in age from 18 to 71 (M = 35.20, SD = 12.15). A majority of the participants were white (n = 200) and male (n = 145). Most participants had taken some college classes or earned at least a bachelor’s degree (n = 213). Almost half (n = 125) reported they were “extremely interested” or “very interested” in government and politics. Slightly more than half (n = 128) reported a political affiliation consistent with Democrats. Procedure Participants initially completed a series of demographic questions, including age, sex, level of education, amount of news consumption, political affiliation, and level of political interest. Participants also reported their prior familiarity with the topic and their opinion of President Obama. The main survey experiment involved three steps. First, participants read a brief statement (79 words) supporting the need for Congress to raise the debt ceiling to avoid an economic crisis. Participants were randomly assigned to read the identical statement attributed to President Obama (n = 134) or to leading economists (n = 117). The statement noted that the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged two thousand points the last time Congress considered not raising the debt ceiling. Participants recorded their evaluation of

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the strength of the argument using a semantic differential scale (explained below). Second, participants were randomly assigned to read a lengthy analysis by a nonpartisan fact-checking organization. Some participants (n = 128) were assigned to read an analysis suggesting the statement was “mostly true” while others (n = 123) were assigned to read an analysis suggesting the statement was “mostly false.” The analysis in both conditions was lengthy (449 words) and provided an explanation that the stock market did decline nearly two thousand points, but over a longer period of time. It also noted that the losses had been recovered within a few months. The analysis in both the mostly false and mostly true conditions were identical except for the conclusion and references to the source. Participants rated the strength of the argument made by the fact-check analysis using the same semantic differential scale. Finally, participants provided a final evaluation of the initial statement using the same scale. Measures Argument strength was measured using a six-item 7-point semantic differential scale. The scale has been successfully used in prior research on factchecking. 51 The pairs included correct–incorrect, valuable–worthless, unsound–sound, poorly reasoned–well reasoned, logical–illogical, and reasonable–unreasonable. Items were recoded so that the negative element received the lower score. Items were averaged to create an overall evaluation score. Lower scores indicated a weaker argument while higher scores indicated a stronger argument. The semantic differential scales used in the survey were reliable. Cronbach’s alpha for the scales were initial evaluation of the statement (M = .96), evaluation of fact-check analysis (M = .95), and final evaluation of the statement (M = .97). Following Garrett, Nisbet, and Lynch, participants were asked about their prior knowledge of the claim and the rebuttal. 52 First, prior awareness of the issue was measured by asking respondents how closely they followed the debate surrounding raising the debt ceiling. Responses ranged from 1 = “very closely” to 4 = “not at all.” Second, prior awareness of the rebuttal was measured by asking respondents if they had “encountered information that disputes the economic risk associated with not raising the debt ceiling.” Responses ranged from 1 = “have encountered” this information to 2 = “have not encountered” this information. Both questions also included an option for “Don’t know.” For both questions, participants were split between those with prior knowledge (if they answered 1 to the question) and those without prior knowledge (all other answers). Attitude toward President Obama was measured using a standard 0–100 feeling thermometer. 53

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Results RQ1 addressed the role of political affiliation, source and prior knowledge on the initial evaluation of a political statement. A three-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) compared political affiliation (Democrat, Non-Democrat), source (Obama, leading economists), and prior knowledge of the issue (aware, not aware) on the initial evaluation of the statement. There was a significant main effect for political affiliation, F(1, 240) = 61.63, p < .001, M p2 = .20. Democrats rated the statement as stronger than non-Democrats. There also was a significant main effect for prior knowledge, F(1, 240) = 12.71, p < .001, M p2 = .05. Those aware of the issue rated the initial statement as stronger than those who were less aware of the issue. Both main effects were qualified by an interaction between political affiliation and awareness of the issue, F(1, 240) = 6.01, p = .015, M p2 = .02. Democrats who were aware of the issue rated the initial argument significantly higher than Democrats who were not aware of the issue. For non-Democrats, there was only a slight, non-significant increase in the evaluation by those who were aware compared to those who were not aware (see table 7.1). There was not a significant main effect nor any significant interactions for source of the statement. The opposite pattern emerged for those who previously were aware of the rebuttal. A three-way ANOVA compared initial evaluation of the statement based on political affiliation, source of statement, and prior knowledge of the rebuttal (aware, not aware). There was a significant interaction between political affiliation and awareness of the rebuttal, F(1, 240) = 6.41, p = .012, M p2 = .03. Democrats who were aware of the rebuttal rated the initial statement significantly higher than Democrats who were not aware of the rebuttal. In contrast, non-Democrats who were aware of the rebuttal rated the initial statement as weaker than non-Democrats who were not aware of the rebuttal, though the difference was not significant (see table 7.2). Again, there was not

Table 7.1. Initial evaluation for political statement when aware of issue Condition

Mean

SD

n

Democrats Aware

6.26

0.86

47

Not aware

5.12

1.2

81

Non-Democrats Aware

4.29

1.65

39

Not aware

4.09

1.51

81

Note: Table created by Jeffrey W. Jarman

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a significant main effect nor any significant interactions for source of the statement. RQ2 addressed the role of political affiliation, source, prior knowledge of the rebuttal, and fact-check conclusion on the evaluation of the fact-check analysis. A four-way ANOVA compared political affiliation, source, prior knowledge of the rebuttal, and fact-check conclusion (mostly true, mostly false) on the evaluation of the fact-check criticism. There was a significant three-way interaction between political affiliation, prior knowledge of the issue, and fact-check conclusion, F(1, 232) = 4.149, p = .043, M p2 = .02. The cell means and standard deviations are reported in table 7.3. In the mostly false condition, Democrats who were aware of the rebuttal rated the factcheck analysis as weaker than Democrats who were not aware of the rebuttal. For Democrats, prior knowledge of the counterattitudinal information minimized the effectiveness of the fact-check. But, when the information was novel, it was perceived as stronger. In contrast, non-Democrats who were not aware of the rebuttal rated the fact-check analysis as weaker than those who were aware of the rebuttal. For non-Democrats, prior awareness of proattitudinal information was consistent with stronger ratings than when the information was novel. The difference in rating between Democrats who were aware of the rebuttal and non-Democrats who were aware of the rebuttal was statistically significant. In the mostly true condition, the opposite pattern emerged. 54 Democrats who were aware of the rebuttal rated the fact-check analysis as stronger than those who were not aware of the rebuttal. In this case, Democrats who were aware of the rebuttal to the president’s statement rated the proattitudinal factcheck analysis as stronger than those who were not aware of the rebuttal. Democrats who knew the president’s argument had previously been challenged (awareness of the rebuttal) rated the fact-check analysis as higher than those who did not know the argument had previously been challenged (lack of awareness of the rebuttal). In contrast, non-Democrats who were not

Table 7.2. Initial evaluation for political statement when aware of rebuttal Condition

Mean

SD

n

Democrats Aware

5.92

0.99

56

Not aware

5.24

1.29

72

Non-Democrats Aware

4.02

1.44

65

Not aware

4.33

1.68

55

Note: Table created by Jeffrey W. Jarman

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Table 7.3. Evaluation score for fact-check criticism Condition

Mean

SD

n

Mostly False

Democrats

Aware Not aware

4.57

1.66

30

5.14

1.42

34

Non-Democrats Aware

5.72

1.12

30

Not aware

5.17

1.35

26

Mostly True

Democrats

Aware

5.68

1.45

26

Not aware

5.49

1.32

38

Non-Democrats Aware

5.34

1.62

35

Not aware

5.75

1.20

29

Note: Table created by Jeffrey W. Jarman aware of the rebuttal rated the argument as stronger than non-Democrats who were aware of the rebuttal. For non-Democrats who were aware of the rebuttal, the mostly true condition likely provided disconfirming information. But, for non-Democrat who were unfamiliar with the rebuttal, the fact-check conclusion did not threaten prior knowledge. There was no significant three-way interaction between political affiliation, fact-check conclusion, and prior awareness of the issue. There also were no significant two-way interactions between any of the variables. There was no main effect for source of the statement. RQ3 addressed the role of political affiliation, source of the statement, prior knowledge of the issue, and fact-check conclusion on the final evaluation of the political statement. 55 There was a significant main effect for political affiliation, F(1, 232) = 43.37, p < .001, M p2 = .16. Democrats final ratings of the statement were higher than non-Democrats. There also was a significant main effect for fact-check conclusion, F(1, 232) = 8.14, p = .005, M p2 = .03. Those exposed to the mostly true condition rated the statement higher than those exposed to the mostly false condition. Finally, there was a significant main effect for awareness of the issue, F(1, 232) = 12.69, p < .001, M p2 = .05. Those who were previously aware of the issue rated the statement higher than those who were not previously aware of the statement.

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These main effects were qualified by two significant interactions. First, there was a significant interaction between source and political affiliation, F(1, 232) = 7.62, p = .006, M p2 = .03. For Democrats, the final evaluation was higher when the statement was attributed to President Obama than when the statement was attributed to leading economists. 56 In contrast, for nonDemocrats, the final evaluation was significantly higher when the statement was attributed to leading economists than when it was attributed to President Obama. Second, there was a significant interaction between political affiliation and awareness of the issue, F(1, 232) = 5.78, p = .017, M p2 = .02. For Democrats, the final evaluation was significantly higher for those who previously were aware of the issue than for those who were not aware. For nonDemocrats, there was not a significant difference in the final evaluation based on prior awareness of the issue. RQ4 addressed the role of political affiliation, source of the statement, prior knowledge of the topic, and fact-check conclusion on the change in evaluation of the statement. A repeated-measures ANOVA was conducted. Political affiliation, fact-check conclusion, and source were the betweensubjects factors and evaluations of the statement (initial, final) were the within-subjects factors. On the one hand, there was some promising evidence for the effectiveness of fact-checking. There was a significant effect for the repeated measure, F(1, 240) = 16.37, p < .001, M p2 = .06. The final evaluation was lower than the initial evaluation. There also was a significant interaction between the evaluations and the fact-check conclusion, F(1, 240) = 5.09, p = .025, M p2 = .02. Those exposed to the mostly false fact-check reported lower final evaluations than those exposed to the mostly true factcheck. Both of these results are consistent with the desired outcome for political fact-checking. However, two other results temper the conclusion that fact-checking is effective. First, there was a significant three-way interaction between evaluation, source, and political affiliation, F(1, 240) = 6.56, p = .011, M p2 = .03. For Democrats, change in evaluation (lowering evaluation) was greater when the source was leading economists than when the source was Obama. 57 By contrast, for non-Democrats, the change in evaluation (lowering evaluation) was significantly greater when the source was Obama than when the source of leading economists. In other words, partisans protected their interests by lowering their evaluation more when the source was Obama (for non-Democrats) or leading economists (for Democrats). Second, there was a significant between-subjects main effect for political affiliation, F(1, 240) = 53.97, p < .001, M p2 = .18. Average scores for Democrats were significantly higher than those of non-Democrats. There were no statistically significant interactions with the inclusion of either prior knowledge category.

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STUDY 2 A second study was used to follow up on the influence of motivated reasoning in the evaluation of a fact-check criticism. Study 1 found that participants exposed to the same material, though with a different conclusion, had significantly different evaluations based on political affiliation. For Democrats, the evidence was strong when it was used to show Obama’s statement was mostly true, but weak when it was used to conclude the statement was mostly false. The opposite pattern emerged for non-Democrats. Study 2 further explores how partisans interpret the same set of facts and investigated the following research questions: RQ1: Will the initial evaluation of a political message differ based on political affiliation, and/or prior knowledge of the topic? RQ2: Will the rating ascribed to the fact-check criticism differ based on political attitudes? Method Participants Participants (N = 100) were recruited from Mechanical Turk to complete an online survey (in exchange for $1.00). Participants ranged in age from 21 to 62 (M = 34.53, SD = 10.08). A majority were male (n = 60) and had at least some college courses (n = 85). Half (n = 50) were either extremely interested or very interested in political news and information while only a few were only slightly interested (n = 18) or not interested at all (n = 7). Most participants identified a political affiliation consistent with Democrats (n = 58). Republicans (n = 19) and those with an “other” (n = 23) political affiliation made up the rest of the sample. Procedure This study followed many of the same steps as in the Study 1. Participants read the same brief statement (this time attributed only to President Obama) on the importance of raising the debt ceiling. They evaluated the statement using the same argument strength scale. Then, participants read the same fact-check analysis of the statement with one exception: the final sentence of the analysis left the rating of the president’s statement blank. Participants provided their own rating for the statement. Finally, participants completed a series of demographic questions including age, sex, political affiliation, ideology, and awareness of the topic.

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Measures The initial evaluation of the strength of the argument made by President Obama was measured using the same six-item 7-point semantic differential scale from Study 1. The scale in this study was reliable (M = .95). At the end of the fact-check analysis, participants rated the statement using a 5-point scale with the following options: true, mostly true, half true, mostly false, or false. The answers were coded so that higher numbers indicated the judgment of the President’s statement by the fact-check organization was more true. Awareness of the issue and of the rebuttal were measured using the same questions as Study 1. As in the first study, the participants were split between those who were very aware and those who were not very aware of each item. Ideology and a feeling thermometer for President Obama also were measured using the same questions as Study 1. Results RQ1 addressed the role of political affiliation and prior knowledge on the initial evaluation of a political statement. A two-way ANOVA compared political affiliation and prior knowledge of the issue on the initial evaluation of the statement made by President Obama. The ANOVA confirmed a statistically significant main effect for political affiliation, F(1, 96) = 27.30, p < .001, M p2 = .11. The effect was qualified by an interaction between political affiliation and awareness of the rebuttal, F(1, 96) = 4.21, p = .043, M p2 = .04. For Democrats, the initial argument was rated stronger if they were aware of the rebuttal information than when they were not aware of the rebuttal information. 58 The opposite held for Republicans and other who rated the statement as stronger when they were not aware of the rebuttal information (see table 7.4). There was no interaction when awareness of the issue was substituted for awareness of the rebuttal. RQ2 investigated whether the rating assigned to the fact-check conclusion was associated with political attitudes. Several tests were used to investigate this question. First, Spearman’s rank-order correlation was used to compare both ideology and Obama thermometer rating with the rating of the factcheck analysis. There was a significant, positive correlation between ideology and the conclusion of the fact-check, rs = .36, p < .001. Increases in ideology (becoming more liberal) were associated with increases in the truthfulness rating of the fact-check conclusion. Similarly, there was a significant, positive correlation between the feeling thermometer rating of Obama and the conclusion of the fact-check, rs = .43, p < .001. Again, increases in feeling toward Obama were associated with increases in the truthfulness rating of the fact-check conclusion.

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Table 7.4. Initial evaluation score for political statement by Obama Condition

Mean

SD

n

Democrats Aware

6.08

0.75

15

Not aware

5.42

1.2

43

Non-Democrats Aware

4.07

1.64

18

Not aware

4.55

1.34

24

Note: Table created by Jeffrey W. Jarman Second, a Mann-Whitney U test compared the rating of the fact-check conclusion based on political affiliation (Democrat, non-Democrat). There was a statistically significant difference in the ratings, U = 801, z = 3.197, p = .001, r = .32. Democrats rated the conclusion as more truthful (Mdn = 4) than non-Democrats (Mdn = 3). DISCUSSION This study analyzed partisan reactions to a political statement on raising the debt ceiling that was subject to a fact-check criticism. Several important conclusions can be drawn from the results. First, the results provide strong evidence for the influence of motivated reasoning in the context of political information fact-checking and difficulty of fact-checking to correct misperceptions. There were significant partisan differences in the evaluation of the initial statement and in the evaluation of the fact-check criticism. As predicted by motivated reasoning, political affiliation was a significant source of the difference of opinion on the quality of the argument in initial evaluation of the statement. That political statements are evaluated differently based on political affiliation is not terribly surprising. But, political affiliation also was a significant source of the difference of opinion on the perception of the quality of the fact-check criticism. As these results confirm, rather than treating the fact-check material as an unbiased source of information that can be used to correct misperceptions, partisans engaged in motivated reasoning were likely to accept information that was attitudinally consistent and reject information that was attitudinally inconsistent. The results for the evaluation of the fact-check material are even more surprising given that the evidence used in the fact-checks was identical (Study 1). The only difference was the last sentence declaring the original statement either mostly true or mostly false. Partisans rated the analysis as strong when it was used to justify an attitudinally consistent conclusion

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(mostly true for Democrats and mostly false for non-Democrats), but reached the opposite conclusion when the conclusion was attitudinally inconsistent. The results of Study 2 further support the conclusion that motivated reasoning drives the evaluation of the fact-check criticism: when given the opportunity to declare a judgment, Democrats used the evidence to conclude the original statement was more true than non-Democrats. Furthermore, exposure to a fact-check criticism did not result in a convergence of opinion. The goal of fact-checking should be to reach consensus. 59 “Persisting opposition remains irrational in Bayesian terms.” 60 But, as the results suggest, a strong partisan gap remained after exposure to a fact-check criticism. While qualified by several factors, it was clear that some minor updating occurred, but it was not uniform and it was driven by prior opinion and knowledge of the topic. While previous studies found only modest support for the presence of motivated reasoning, 61 these results provide strong support the motivated processing of fact-check material. Second, there was only modest support for the debiasing potential of masking the source of the original statement. Previous research found significant differences when the source was manipulated, but those differences were not prevalent in this project, with one exception: there was a greater change in evaluation between Democrats and non-Democrats based on if the source was Obama or leading experts. Democrats were easier on Obama while non-Democrats were harsher on Obama. This result is consistent with the expectation of the motivated processing of political information. But, why were other, more significant, source effects not found? One possible explanation is that the attribution of the original statement to leading economists did not sufficiently distance the claim from its partisan origin. As Greitemeyer et al. noted, “even when the source of the presented arguments is not specified, participants may infer what position the source of the argument holds.” 62 It is possible that non-Democrats interpreted the claim as a pro-spending policy and inferred that the argument, while attributed to leading economists, was consistent with the agenda of Democrats and President Obama. Future research should continue to investigate source cues and attempt to analyze topics where partisan inferences are less likely. Third, the results from this project further our understanding of the influence of prior knowledge on the interpretation of political information. On the one hand, prior exposure to attitude consistent information served to reinforce existing attitudes. For instance, Democrats who previously were aware of the issue had higher initial ratings of the statement. Similarly, Republicans who were aware of the rebuttal (an attitude consistent statement) had lower initial ratings. The fact-checking process merely repeated familiar information. In both cases, awareness of an attitude consistent theme was associated with a magnified evaluation of the information when it was subsequently considered. By contrast, prior exposure to attitude inconsistent information

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was associated with resistance to persuasion when the information was subsequently considered. For instance, Democrats who were aware of the rebuttal reported higher initial evaluations of the statement than Democrats who were not aware of the rebuttal. Awareness of the counterattitudinal information did not dissuade these Democrats. While beyond the scope of the data reported in the chapter, inoculation provides one potential explanation for the result. Proattitudinal information subject to a fact-check criticism, especially for those who were aware that there was an argument on the other side, were likely to feel their position was threatened. But, in the process, threat triggered resistance to persuasion. As Compton and Pfau explained, “a receiver must feel that an existing belief is threatened to motivate the work needed to strengthen an attitude. There must be a catalyst to resistance. McGuire proposed that this catalyst was threat, conceptualized as the recognition of impending challenges to attitudes.” 63 Fact-checking, then, by its nature, may serve to signal a threat that can lead to some participants to resist persuasion of counterattitudinal information. Furthermore, these results suggest that fact-checking claims immediately, before exposure increases familiarity with the positions taken by each side, is necessary in order to reduce the influence of misinformation. The goal of fact-checking is to provide information necessary for citizens to meaningfully participate in the public sphere. The ideal, rooted in a commitment to rationality, is that citizens will update their opinions on the basis of new information. Fact-checking provides the public with an easy means to acquire reliable information and thereby minimize the influence of misinformation. However, as the results reported in this chapter suggest, motivated reasoning likely derails a completely rational consideration of the evidence and instead enables partisans to cling to their prior beliefs, regardless of their veracity. These results, while sobering, should not be used to abandon factchecking or otherwise give up on a search for “truth” in the public sphere. Rather, future research on the topic should continue to investigate how political statements can be scrutinized while minimizing the effects of motivated reasoning. REFERENCES Adair, Bill, and Ishan Thakore. “Fact-Checking Census Finds Continued Growth around the World.” Reporters Lab, January 19, 2015. http://reporterslab.org/fact-checking-censusfinds-growth-around-world/. American National Election Study. “American National Election Study, 2008: Pre- and postelection survey (ICPSR 25383).” Last updated August 30, 2012. http:// www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ICPSR/studies/25383. Ansolabehere, Stephen, and Shanto Iyengar, “Can the Press Monitor Campaign Advertising? An Experimental Study.” The International Journal of Press/Politics 1, no. 1. (1996): 72–86. doi:10.1177/1081180X96001001006.

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Bartels, Larry M. “Beyond the Running Tally: Partisan Bias in Political Perceptions.” Political Behavior 24, no. 2 (2002): 117–50. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1558352. Boddery, Scott S., and Jeff Yates. “Do Policy Messengers Matter? Majority Opinion Writers as Policy Cues in Public Agreement with Supreme Court Decisions.” Political Research Quarterly 67, no. 4 (2014): 851–63. doi:10.1177/1065912914545539. Buhrmester, Michael, Tracy Kwang, and Samuel D. Gosling. “Amazon’s Mechanical Turk: A New Source of Inexpensive, Yet High-Quality, Data?” Perspectives on Psychological Science 6, no. 1 (2011): 3–5. doi:10.1177/1745691610393980. Bullock, John G. “Partisanship and the Enduring Effects of False Political Information.” Unpublished manuscript, last modified October 12, 2006. http://www.nyu.edu /gsas/dept/politics/seminars/bullock_f06.pdf. Cappella, Joseph N., and Kathleen Hall Jamieson. 1994. “Broadcast Adwatch Effects: A Field Experiment.” Communication Research 21, no. 3 (1994): 342–65. doi:10.1177/ 009365094021003006. Carlisle, Juliet E., Jessica T. Feezell, Kristy E. H. Michaud, Eric R. A. N. Smith, and Leanna Smith. “The Public’s Trust in Scientific Claims Regarding Offshore Oil Drilling.” Public Understanding of Science 19, no. 5 (2010): 514–27. doi:10.1177/0963662510375663. Chambers, Simone. “Rhetoric and the Public Sphere: Has Deliberative Democracy Abandoned Mass Democracy?” Political Theory 37, no. 3 (2009): 323–50. doi:10.1177/ 0090591709332336. Compton, Joshua A., and Michael Pfau. “Inoculation Theory of Resistance to Influence at Maturity: Recent Progress in Theory Development and Application and Suggestions for Future Research.” Communication Yearbook 29, no. 1 (2005): 97–145. doi:10.1207/ s15567419cy2901_4. Dahlgren, Peter. “Doing Citizenship: The Cultural Origins of Civic Agency in the Public Sphere.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 93, no. 3 (2006): 267–86. doi:10.1177/ 1367549406066073. Damasio, Antonio R. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Putnam, 1994. Druckman, James N., Erik Peterson, and Rune Slothuus. “How Elite Partisan Polarization Affects Public Opinion Formation.” American Political Science Review 107, no. 1 (2013): 57–79. doi:10.1017/S0003055412000500. Edwards, Kari, and Edward E. Smith. “A Disconfirmation Bias in the Evaluation of Arguments.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 71, no. 1 (1996): 5–24. doi:10.1037// 0022-3514.71.1.5. Frantzich, Stephen. “Watching the Watchers: The Nature and Content of Campaign Ad Watches.” Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 7, no. 2 (2002): 34–57. doi:10.1177/1081180X0200700204. Fridkin, Kim, Patrick J. Kenney, and Amanda Wintersieck. “Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire: How Fact-Checking Influences Citizens’ Reactions to Negative Advertising.” Political Communication 32, no. 1 (2015): 127–51. doi:10.1080/10584609.2014.914613. Garrett, R. Kelly, Erik C. Nisbet, and Emily K. Lynch. “Undermining the Corrective Effects of Media-Based Political Fact Checking? The Role of Contextual Cues and Naïve Theory.” Journal of Communication 63, no. 4 (2013): 1–21. doi:10.1111/jcom.12038. Goodin, Robert E. “The Paradox of Persisting Opposition.” Politics, Philosophy and Economics 1, no. 1 (2002): 109–46. doi:10.1177/1470594X02001001005. Gottfried, Jeffrey A., Bruce W. Hardy, Kenneth M. Winneg, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson. “Did Fact Checking Matter in the 2012 Presidential Campaign?” American Behavioral Scientist 57, no. 11 (2013): 1558–67. doi:10.1177/0002764213489012. Greitemeyer, Tobias. “I Am Right, You Are Wrong: How Biased Assimilation Increases the Perceived Gap between Believers and Skeptics of Violent Video Game Effects.” Plos One 9, no. 4 (2014): e93440. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0093440. Greitemeyer, Tobias, Peter Fischer, Dieter Frey, and Stefan Schulz-Hardt. “Biased Assimilation: The Role of Source Position.” European Journal of Social Psychology 39 (2009): 22–39. doi:10.1002/ejsp.497.

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Grynaviski, Jeffrey D. “A Bayesian Learning Model with Applications to Party Identification.” Journal of Theoretical Politics 18, no. 3 (2006): 323–46. doi:10.1177 /0951629806064352. Horton, John J., David G. Rand, and Richard J. Zeckhauser. “The Online Laboratory: Conducting Experiments in a Real Labor Market.” Experimental Economics 14 (2011): 399–425. doi:10.1007/s10683-011-9273-9. Jarman, Jeffrey W. “A Disturbing Conclusion: The Irrelevance of Argument.” In Disturbing Argument: Selected Papers from the 18th Biennial Conference on Argumentation, edited by Catherine Palczewski, 174–80. New York: Routledge, 2014. ———. “The Failure of Fact-Checking.” In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation, edited by Bart Garssen, David Gooden, Gordon Mitchell, and A. F. Snoeck Henkemans, 657–667. Amsterdam: Sic Sat, 2015. ———. “Influence of Political Affiliation and Criticism on the Effectiveness of Political FactChecking.” Communication Research Reports 33, no. 1 (forthcoming). Keller, Punam Anand, and Lauren Goldberg Block. “The Effect of Affect-Based Dissonance Versus Cognition-Based Dissonance on Motivated Reasoning and Health-Related Persuasion.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied 5, no. 3 (1999): 302–13. doi:10.1037/ 1076-898X.5.3.302. Kessler, Glenn. “The Global Boom in Political Fact Checking.” Washington Post, June 13, 2014. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2014/06/13/the-globalboom-in-fact-checking/. Kuklinski, James H., Paul J. Quirk, Jennifer Jerit, David Schwieder, and Robert F. Rich. “Misinformation and the Currency of Democratic Citizenship.” Journal of Politics 62, no. 3 (2000): 790–816. doi:10.1111/0022-3816.00033. Lasswell, Harold D. Democracy through Public Opinion. Menasha, WI: George Banta Publishing, 1941. Lodge, Milton, and Charles S. Taber. “The Automaticity of Affect for Political Leaders, Groups, and Issues: An Experimental Test of the Hot Cognition Hypothesis.” Political Psychology 26, no. 3 (2005):455–82. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9221.2005.00426.x. Lord, Charles G., Lee Ross, and Mark R. Lepper. “Biased Assimilation and Attitude Polarization: The Effects of Prior Theories on Subsequently Considered Evidence.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37, no. 11 (1979): 2098–109. doi:10.1037/00223514.37.11.2098. Mason, Winter, and Siddharth Suri. “Conducting Behavioral Research on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.” Behavior Research Methods 44, no. 1. (2011): 1–23. doi:10.3758/s13428-0110124-6. McKinnon, Lori M., and Lynda Lee Kaid. “Exposing Negative Campaigning or Enhancing Advertising Effects: An Experimental Study of Adwatch Effects on Voters’ Evaluations of Candidates and Their Ads.” Journal of Applied Communication Research 27, no. 3 (1999): 217–36. doi:10.1080/00909889909365537. Meirick, Patrick C. “Motivated Misperception? Party, Education, Partisan News, and Belief in ‘Death Panels.’” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 90, no. 1 (2013): 39–57. doi:10.1177/1077699012468696. ———. “Misinformation and Fact-Checking: Research Findings from Social Science.” Media Policy Initiative Research Paper, New America Foundation, February 2012. http:// www.dartmouth.edu/~nyhan/Misinformation_and_Fact-checking.pdf. ———. “When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions.” Political Behavior 32 (2010): 303–30. doi:10.1007/s11109-010-9112-2. O’Sullivan, Patrick B., and Seth Geiger. “Does the Watchdog Bite? Newspaper Ad Watch Articles and Political Attack Ads.” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 72, no. 4 (1995): 771–85. doi:10.1177/107769909507200402. Petty, Richard E., and John T. Cacioppo. “The Elaboration Likelihood Model of Persuasion.” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 19 (1986): 123–205. http://www. communicationcache.com/uploads/1/0/8/8/10887248/elm_original_1986.pdf.

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Pfau, Michael, and Allan Louden. “Effectiveness of Adwatch Formats in Deflecting Political Attack Ads.” Communication Research 21, no. 3 (1994): 325–41. doi:10.1177/ 009365094021003005. Popkin, Samuel L. The Reasoning Voter. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Rowland, Robert C. “The Battle for Health Care Reform and the Liberal Public Sphere.” In Exploring Argumentative Contexts, edited by Franz H. van Eemeren and Bart Garssen, 269–88. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2012. Schudson, Michael. The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life. New York: Martin Kessler Books,1998. Schwarz, Norbert, Lawrence J. Sanna, Ian Skurnik, and Carolyn Yoon. “Metacognitive Experiences and the Intricacies of Setting People Straight: Implications for Debiasing and Public Information Campaigns.” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 39: 127–61. doi:10.1016/S0065-2601(06)39003-X. Skurnik, Ian, Carolyn Yoon, and Norbert Schwarz. “‘Myths & Facts’ About the Flu: Health Education Campaigns Can Reduce Vaccination Intentions.” Unpublished manuscript. 2015. http://webuser.bus.umich.edu/yoonc/research/Papers/Skurnik_Yoon_Schwarz_2005_Myths_Facts_Flu_Health_Education_Campaigns_JAMA.pdf. Taber, Charles S., Damon Cann, and Simona Kucsova. “The Motivated Processing of Political Arguments.” Political Behavior 31 (2009): 137–55. doi:10.1007/s11109-008-9075-8. Taber, Charles S., and Milton Lodge. “Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Beliefs.” American Journal of Political Science 50, no. 3 (2006): 755–69. doi:10.1111/ j.1540-5907.2006.00214.x. Westen, Drew. The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation. New York: Public Affairs, 2007.

NOTES 1. Lasswell, Democracy through Public Opinion, 80. 2. Dahlgren, “Doing Citizenship,” 277. 3. Rowland, “The Battle for Health Care Reform,” 271. 4. Ibid., 272. 5. Schudson, The Good Citizen. 6. Popkin, The Reasoning Voter, 7. 7. Chambers, “Rhetoric and the Public Sphere,” 334. 8. Kuklinski et al., “Misinformation and the Currency of Democratic Citizenship,” 791. 9. Grynaviski, “A Bayesian Learning Model,” 331. 10. Westen, The Political Brain, 25. 11. Damasio, Descartes’ Error, 171. 12. Chambers, “Rhetoric and the Public Sphere,” 333. 13. Frantzich, “Watching the Watchers,” 35. 14. Kessler, “The Global Boom in Political Fact Checking.” 15. Adair and Thakore, “Fact-Checking Census Finds Continued Growth.” 16. See for example Cappella and Jamieson, “Broadcast Adwatch Effects”; and O’Sullivan and Geiger, “Does the Watchdog Bite?” 17. McKinnon and Kaid, “Exposing Negative Campaigning”; and Pfau and Louden, “Effectiveness of Adwatch Formats.” 18. Ansolabehere and Iyengar, “Can the Press Monitor Campaign Advertising?” 82. 19. Gottfried et al., “Did Fact Checking Matter,” 1563. 20. Garrett, Nisbet, and Lynch, “Undermining the Corrective Effects,” 12. 21. Fridkin, Kenney, and Wintersieck, “Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire,” 135. 22. See Jarman, “A Disturbing Conclusion”; “The Failure of Fact-Checking”; and “Influence of Political Affiliation and Criticism.” 23. Lodge and Taber, “The Automaticity of Affect,” 456. 24. Ibid., 456. 25. Ibid., 459.

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26. Taber and Lodge, “Motivated Skepticism.” 27. Taber, Cann, and Kucsova, “The Motivated Processing.” 28. Lord, Ross, and Lepper, “Biased Assimilation and Attitude Polarization.” 29. Bullock, “Partisanship and the Enduring Effects.” 30. Taber and Lodge, “Motivated Skepticism,” 757. 31. Lord et al., “Biased Assimilation and Attitude Polarization,” 2009. 32. Bullock, “Partisanship and the Enduring Effects”; Carlisle et al., “The Public’s Trust in Scientific Claims”; Edwards and Smith, “A Disconfirmation Bias”; Greitemeyer, “I Am Right, You Are Wrong”; Keller and Block, “The Effect of Affect-Based Dissonance”; Lord et al., “Biased Assimilation and Attitude Polarization”; Meirick, “Motivated Misperception?”; Nyhan and Reifler, “When Corrections Fail”; Taber et al., “The Motivated Processing”; and Taber and Lodge, “Motivated Skepticism.” 33. Taber and Lodge, “Motivated Skepticism,” 756. 34. Ibid., 756. 35. Nyhan and Reifler, “When Corrections Fail,” 307. 36. Jarman, “A Disturbing Conclusion”; “The Failure of Fact-Checking”; and “Influence of Political Affiliation and Criticism.” 37. Fridkin et al., “Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire.” 38. Nyhan and Reifler, “Misinformation and Fact-Checking,” 18. 39. Boddery and Yates, “Do Policy Messengers Matter?” 40. Druckman, Peterson, and Slothuus, “How Elite Partisan Polarization.” 41. Ibid., 68. 42. Garrett et al., “Undermining the Corrective Effects,” 11. 43. Ibid., Table 2, Model 2 and 3. 44. Skurnik, Yoon, and Schwarz, “‘Myths & Facts’ About the Flu,” 4. 45. Schwarz et al., “Metacognitive Experiences,” 146–47. 46. Petty and Cacioppo, “The Elaboration Likelihood Model of Persuasion,” 148. 47. Kuklinski et al., “Misinformation and the Currency of Democratic Citizenship,” 85. 48. Lord, Ross, and Lepper, “Biased Assimilation and Attitude Polarization.” 49. Buhrmester, Kwang, and Gosling, “Amazon’s Mechanical Turk; Horton, Rand, and Zeckhauser, “The Online Laboratory”; Mason and Suri, “Conducting Behavioral Research.” 50. Jarman, “A Disturbing Conclusion”; “The Failure of Fact-Checking”; and “Influence of Political Affiliation and Criticism.” 51. Jarman, “A Disturbing Conclusion”; “The Failure of Fact-Checking”; and “Influence of Political Affiliation and Criticism.” 52. Garrett et al., “Undermining the Corrective Effects.” 53. American National Election Study, “American National Election Study, 2008.” 54. However, none of the differences were statistically significant. 55. Substituting awareness of the rebuttal produced similar results. 56. The difference was nearly statistically significant, p = .09. 57. The difference was nearly statistically significant, p = .07. 58. The difference was nearly statistically significant, p = .09. 59. Bartels, “Beyond the Running Tally,” 122. 60. Goodin, “The Paradox of Persisting Opposition,” 136. 61. Fridkin et al., “Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire.” 62. Greitemeyer et al., “Biased Assimilation,” 24. 63. Compton and Pfau, “Inoculation Theory of Resistance” 98.

Chapter Eight

Telling the Truth about War in Six Words Lisa Silvestri

In war, truth is the first casualty. —Aeschylus Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society. —Emerson 1

The cannon of truth is changing. The current media ecology represents a galvanizing democratization of knowledge on the one hand and a stifling surplus of information on the other. As a result, our relationship to “the truth” has changed. 2 One way to appreciate this shift is by examining the socially sanctioned criteria by which we assess truth claims today. A new book project called Six-Word War promises “real stories from Iraq and Afghanistan in just six words.” 3 Touted as “the first ‘crowdsourced’ war memoir,” 4 the project’s creators cite Ernest Hemingway’s famous six-word short story, “For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn,” as their inspiration for the project. 5 The magic of the six-word story is its concision. Hemingway’s six words powerfully convey the loss of a child. The story’s potency derives from what is not there, the suggested context. The lure surrounding Hemingway’s story is that he wrote it in response to a bet. He and his contemporaries were testing the limits of narrative: How short a story can be before it is no longer considered a story. 6 A difference between Hemingway’s six words and those shared by Six-Word War is that Hemingway’s story was not meant to be autobiographical. Rather, it was considered an exercise in flash fiction. By contrast, Six-Word War compiles first-person war memoirs. 135

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Traditionally conceived, a memoir suggests eyewitness testimony or personal observation; the word itself derives from the Latin memoria, or memory. As such, we tend to assign memoirs a higher truth-value than we do other genres of writing. Through this lens, one could argue that Hemingway’s story conveys social truth, whereas the veterans’ stories convey personal truth. 7 Hemingway’s story indeed implies a truthful pain, but sharing it in response to a bet suggests that it does not derive from firsthand experience. Instead, Hemingway’s story speaks a truth on behalf of a generalized Other. The veterans, by contrast, speak for themselves. And in a communication culture heavily influenced by social media practices, self-disclosure has gained considerable truth-value. As Descartes said, the only thing of which we can be certain is private subjective experience. 8 All this is to say, matters of veracity have become increasingly complicated. Borrowing the sentiment of John Durham Peters in his seminal treatise on the history of communication, Paula Tompkins writes, “the relevant ethical question is not truth but whether there is a preference for truth as one understands it.” 9 Instead of aiming for epistemological certainty, we should aim for truthfulness as a “principle of veracity.” As Peters writes, “The criterion for knowing should not be accurate duplication of the world, but the ability to make our way through with the best aids we can.” 10 In this spirit, the following essay considers some of the ways in which the Six-Word War project represents a new mode of truthful storytelling. The project reflects a hybrid of conventions commonly associated with telling the truth. Some examples include a reliance on eyewitness testimony, the value of immediacy, recognition of truth’s inherent partiality, and (paradoxically) a presentational format that follows a familiar, linear model. The following section discusses some of the new ways in which we evaluate firsthand accounts of war. What, for example, do emergent styles and conventions tell us about our evolving relationship to the truth? Next, the essay examines social media culture’s emphasis on immediacy and brevity, and how those qualities might inhibit broad public engagement with the reality of war. And finally a concluding section considers how new forms of truth might impact the cannon of memory. NEW FORMS OF THE EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT There is a widely held assumption that the troops’ perspectives offer the most authentic accounts of war. 11 This assumption derives from a collective belief in the primacy of eyewitness testimony. 12 Until recently, civilians relied almost exclusively on professional war photographers and photojournalists to be the “eyes” of war and perhaps more significantly, “the eyes of America’s conscience.” 13 But advancements in digital imaging technology, coupled

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with the proliferation of high-speed Internet access in Iraq and Afghanistan, have made it so that the troops, themselves, can quickly and easily share their first-hand experiences with civilians back home. 14 The troops’ propensity to document and share wartime footage has led to a gluttony of user-generated content emanating from these wars. In fact, Iraq and Afghanistan are the most mediated conflicts in history. 15 Easy public access to the surplus of image-saturated media means that photojournalism and traditional war reporting have lost currency. 16 At the same time, the nature of warfare itself has changed in such a way that correspondents and photojournalists can no longer represent (or explain) the US mission with traditional evidentiary methods. As Robert Hariman describes, US involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan marks a “transformation of war from major state conflict to a shadow state of globalized violence.” 17 As such, the American public has come to expect a messier narrative without the familiar tropes associated with traditional war reporting. Indeed, as Liam Kennedy points out, Iraq and Afghanistan have “dissolve[d] into a perpetual war on terror” 18 and under conditions of perpetual war, it becomes harder for photojournalists and war reporters to shape public understanding of events. After more than ten years of conflict, pictures from Iraq and Afghanistan “start to meld into one,” 19 becoming “an amalgam of all the images of war and death that we have embedded in our memory.” 20 As a consequence, images themselves have lost truth-value, demanding an intellectual and creative revival of war representation. In other words, Iraq and Afghanistan reveal the limits of narrative. That is, they are so difficult to describe and report, they require a new grammar for contemporary war narratives. 21 One response is to revisit older forms of first-person accounts of war. The First World War inspired a surprising amount of writing among soldiers. According to Martyn Lyons, the First World War generated a “seismic cultural shift” of ordinary soldiers writing about their experiences in letters, diaries, poems, novels, and, decades later, in memoirs. Lyons writes that the First World War produced “a massive outpouring” of writing among “people who were barely literate and totally unaccustomed to handling a pen.” 22 In a similar vein, Six-Word War describes itself as a “challenge,” acknowledging “not everyone has the will or the way to write their own memoir about their experience but therein lies the merit of finding your own six-word war; it’s painful and gratifying but sometimes six words are all you need.” 23 Thus the memoirs shared in Six-Word War are not unlike the literary styles adopted by troops during the First World War. And like those troops, the veterans contributing to Six-Word War face their own literacy challenges. This time, with word count restrictions. Another common feature among the literature produced by these two groups is their use of irony. In his sweeping analysis of Great War literary styles, Paul Fussell describes recurring rhetorical patterns in the memoirs,

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novels, and poems written by Great War soldiers. Chief among those is irony. According to Fussell, Great War soldiers used irony to emphasize the futility of war. 24 As a rhetorical device, irony presents a deliberate contradiction. It draws attention to (and often invokes dark laughter over) the gap between expectation and experience. Irony has proven useful in representations of Iraq and Afghanistan as well. Kennedy argues, “Irony has become a primary technique, a means of drawing attention to the shortcomings in viewers perceptions of the wars.” 25 The now satirical image of President Bush declaring “Mission Accomplished” in 2003 comes to mind. Not only does irony reveal the American public’s misperceptions about US involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it also enables the troops to voice their own disillusionment with the war experience. Some examples of irony included in Six-Word War are: “So glad I helped Shell Oil;” “I love to spread Democracy . . . ’Merica;” and “Helmand Province: World’s Greatest Whackamole Game.” 26 As a rhetorical device, irony asks audience members to stop and think about what has just been said. It is an invitation to critical reflection. Irony reveals the limits to what we know and asks us to explore the gaps between perception and reality. For irony to “work,” however, the audience must recognize the difference between what is said and what is normal or expected. 27 Audiences for Great War soldiers and for post-9/11 veterans are notably different. During the First World War, soldiers wrote for smaller readerships. Their letters, poems, and memoirs were rarely published. By contrast, most service members today communicate primarily to a broad social network audience consisting of both close ties and distant acquaintances. 28 In contradistinction with their Great War counterparts, post-9/11 GIs are practically guaranteed publication today through internet-enabled communication technologies. The potential audience for Six-Word War stories consisted of a public even broader than a veteran’s online social network because he or she had to upload the story to a publicly accessible website (www.sixwordwar.com). As such, it is fair to assume that post-9/11 veterans wrote their six-word war stories for an expansive, undefined, and faceless Internet audience. However, a critical reading of these stories suggests that the primary imagined audience consists of other military personnel. The stories appear to be written for those who share a sense of context. For example, a majority of the six-word war stories refer to culturally specific, experiential knowledge. One story reads, “The POGs took all the Copenhagen.” 29 For audience members in the know, POG stands for “person other than grunt.” It is a derogatory label infantry Marines give fellow Marines who are not part of an infantry unit or who fulfill more supportive roles in the rear echelon. Copenhagen is a brand of smokeless tobacco. In another example, a story reads, “Never going to give you up.” 30 Some readers, without the requisite insider knowledge, might be

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inclined to interpret this story by using stereotypical frameworks for understanding. A heartbroken soldier received his “Dear John” while overseas or a brave officer mourns the loss of a comrade in battle. However, read within a more nuanced historical, sociocultural context, this story becomes a practical joke on the reader. It is a “RickRoll.” The cultural practice of “Rick-rolling” first became popular in 2007 and involves a bait-and-switch tactic whereby the baited person finds herself inadvertently exposed to the audio, video, or lyrics of Rick Astley’s 1987 hit single “Never Gonna Give You Up.” 31 All this is to say that, taken alone, these six-word stories do not necessarily contribute a richer public understanding of war. But they are, nonetheless, truthful in the sense that they derive from personal, lived experience. In fact, audiences may even perceive them as more truthful because of their apparent reliance on “insider knowledge.” As Kari Anden-Papadopoulos argues, a “lack of prescribed framings and official narratives . . . provide raw, often unfiltered views that resist an all too neat packaging of war.” 32 In other words, the American public has grown suspicious of mass-mediated, smoothly polished, top-down narratives, causing us to privilege more individualized mosaics of meaning, even if they do not make obvious sense to us. NEW DEMANDS FOR TRUTH CLAIMS It is of little wonder that six-word stories find resonance in a mobile, social media culture where messages travel in high volume and with great haste. A reason for the fast-paced, communication onslaught is because participation in our digital public sphere is mandatory. 33 If you do not participate, you do not exist. As a result, our value system has evolved to emphasize communicative norms associated with immediacy, brevity, and self-disclosure. These values, in turn, impact perceptions of truth. For example, an immediate, personal impression indicates authenticity and candor. Authenticity is a performative code associated with truth telling. Immediacy lends perceived truth-value to first-person perspectives because an immediate response does not allow time for sensible reflection. 34 In this way, it is useful to think of Six-Word War as an extension to Hemingway’s initial inquiry about the limits of narrative. Instead of testing brevity, however, Six-Word War tests the bounds of immediacy. How soon can a narrative be written? Can a memoir truthfully capture an event that is still taking place? Six-Word War participates in the logic of immediacy by asking individuals to compose a memoir about an event that is still in the process of unfolding. Critical memoir scholar Thomas Larson examines the influence of digital communication technology on memoir writing practices. He identifies an increasingly popular subgenre known as the “sudden memoir,” whereby the memoirist writes about “the immediate past, even the still corruptible

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present, not waiting for time to ripen or change what they know.” 35 In this way, immediacy influences narrative not only at the point of creation, but also results in a new end product itself—in this case, an “instant history” of war. 36 Instant histories make it difficult to decipher the “structure of feeling” for these wars; that is, the common set of perceptions and values shared by a particular generation as expressed in various cultural forms. 37 Instead, spontaneous personal narratives like the ones featured in Six-Word War consist mostly of private, idiosyncratic, and isolated events. On their own, the entries are as difficult to narrate as a series of status updates would be. Yet there are recurrent themes among them such as “waste” or “pointlessness.” These patterns suggest an emergent structure of feeling, and truth’s subsistence as an aggregate phenomenon. In other words, if everyone is saying the same thing, it must be true. According to Six-Word War, the overall structure of feeling regarding US involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan was that it was: “A waste of good American lives;” a “Waste of money, time, and lives”; and “A huge waste of American money.” 38 Hemingway created his six-word short story to demonstrate an absurd extremity. The popular resurgence of the six-word format, however, reveals the nature of our shortsighted attention economy and noncommittal interest in one another. With the constant flow of information coursing through our shared online spaces, humans lack the requisite attention to take it all in. 39 Therefore, we develop shorthand attention techniques such as word count limits or hashtag systems. The six-word format is another such example. Tell us your story, but do it in six words. It brings to mind the new acronym unique to the digital age, “TLDR.” It stands for “too long, didn’t read.” As Ritchie points out, “A war is ‘over’ in public consciousness when it is declared as such in the media.” 40 Sadly, for most Americans, their response to the global war on terror appears to be “TLDR.” When limited, communicators rely on stereotypical perceptions and thinking. Six text-based words lead to direct, oftentimes blunt, messages that lack the flexibility, nuance, and equivocation afforded through other communication channels. This is one reason veterans end up writing to each other. Only those who share a sense of context can appreciate the fullest meaning of those six words. This begs the question as to whether Six-Word War can serve its purported educational function of giving readers “a deeper glimpse into the experiences from Iraq and Afghanistan.” 41 Instead this book appears to expose the shallowness of our collective engagement with these wars. Indeed, the post-9/11 veterans who contributed to the six-word war project did so under asymmetrical communication conditions. Conversation analysts consider asymmetrical communication to be a relational imbalance between speaker and audience resulting from social and institutional factors. It is important to point out that less than 1 percent of Americans serve in the

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armed forces and an even smaller portion deploy to a war zone. 42 Therefore the voices represented by the Six-Word War make up a small minority of the American population. Even beyond the context of public conversations about war, the very nature of online communication is often asymmetrical. Communicating to a faceless audience offers minimal guarantee that a message will be received. The only indicators of receipt come in the form of occasional “likes” or comments. We must move beyond sporadic care. It is as if we are communicating at as opposed to with one another; a point exacerbated by emergent communication norms requiring brief, immediate responses. How, then, can we reestablish a sense of symmetry and dialogue? One response would be to move offline. Although Internet-enabled digital technologies have done much to expand our expressive capabilities, they have also played a hand at stunting progress toward deeper engagement with one another as members of the global commons. As Bruce Ackerman argues, “However imperfect a philosophy classroom or church discussion group or psychoanalytic office may seem . . . surely they are better bets than the public forum.” 43 But it is important to recognize that technical structures do not determine human behavior. “Dialogue is an attitude toward another, not a technique or skill.” 44 It demands sensitivity and a willingness to meet others where they are, and to acknowledge the limits of what we understand and know. Dialogue depends on our willingness to remain open to possibility and ask questions of others and ourselves. For veterans who wrote six-word war stories, the only confirmation that their message was received came through its appearance in the book. However, not all of the stories made it into the book; only around six hundred of them did. 45 It is detrimental to dialogue to assume that one voice can stand in for a collective. Without careful attention, it is easy to allow one veteran voice to become a synecdoche for the entirety of the veteran eyewitness account. This is, in part, because of the way the stories are presented in idiosyncratic, purposely disordered fragments. But also in the way the stories were solicited in the first place. In August 2013, Mike Nemeth and Shaun Wheelwright (both US Army veterans and West Point graduates) launched a campaign on the digital crowdfunding platform, Kickstarter, to solicit financial support to publish the Six-Word War. Within one month, they raised $6,233 from 137 backers to bring the book’s publication to fruition. The Kickstarter campaign included a multi-level incentive structure, which informed not only who could contribute financial support, but also who could lend their voice to the project. There were eight pledge levels ranging from five to five thousand dollars. According to the campaign’s retrospective overview, no one contributed more than five hundred dollars to the project through the Kickstarter website. What is unique about this project’s incentive structure is that each

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pledge-level specified an eligibility requirement. Essentially, backers fell into one of two categories: they were either veterans who served in Iraq or Afghanistan, or they were not (possibly friends, family members, or veterans from other foreign wars). Only Iraq or Afghanistan veterans could contribute content to the book, so incentives that included publishing a story (with a pledge of $50) or a photo (with a pledge of $200), were not available to other backers. 46 Pledging $50 or more was the only guarantee that a veteran’s story would end up in the book. PRESENT TRUTHS, FUTURE MEMORIES Crowdfunding models and other Internet-enabled communication technologies have done much to democratize opportunities for public expression. 47 Projects like the Six-Word War demonstrate a restructured balance of storytelling power. 48 What is compelling about this project, however, is that it maintains a reverence for traditional mass-mediated formats. By publishing a hardbound book, the creators ostensibly affirm that stories and memoirs still primarily belong in book form. At the same time, they celebrate the partiality and multivocality inherent to narrative truth. Actually, a linear presentation of a non-narrative structure might be the most honest expression of what these wars have felt like to both the veterans and the American public. In spite of their decontextualized presentation, however, it is important to recognize that the six-word war stories are not self-evident. They are excerpts, or memory aids ripped from context. To analogize, there is an important distinction between using a photo to tell a story, and the photo itself being the story. 49 Collapsing the two can have problematic, isolating consequences. When expressive outlets have so many restrictions attached to them (word count, immediacy, attention deficit, etc.) people are forced to share only with those who have similar experiences. What will this do to dialogue and to our capacity for empathy and understanding? Does this mean sharing truths will become a purely local phenomenon? Do our digitally fostered communication values make it impossible to translate disembodied truth? Truth and communication are inextricably linked. New forms of communication have historically served as sources of distrust over truth claims. Plato, for example, harbored grave suspicions over papyrus and the practice of writing. 50 A concern over the impact new communication technologies have on truth derives, in part, from truth’s relationship to memory. How we articulate truth at one point in time will inform what we remember in another. For example, contemporary memory scholars like Andrew Hoskins are expressing concern that “the connective turn” is “hollowing out” memory. 51 And according to Larson, “The potential for anyone to write a good memoir . . . impugns the genius tradition of creation and lessens the value of

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literature based on a hierarchy of stylistic innovation.” 52 Yet the exciting thing is that the current democratized publishing environment opens the possibility to discover new kinds of narrative truth, and subsequently new ways of sorting, sifting, and seeing the past. After all, the struggle to win social memory requires competing histories and subsequently several different kinds of truth. Six-Word War represents not only a new form of truth telling but also a new mode of memory making. REFERENCES Ackerman, Bruce. “Why dialogue?” Journal of Philosophy 86 (1989): 5–22. Anden-Papadopoulos, Kari. “US Soldiers Imaging the Iraq War on YouTube.” Popular Communication 7, no. 2 (2009): 17–27. doi:10.1080/15405700802584304. Andersen, Robin. “Images of War: Photojournalism, Ideology, and Central America.” Latin American Perspectives 16, no. 2 (1989): 96–114. Arendt, Hannah. “Concern with Politics in Recent European Philosophical Thought.” Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism. Edited by Jerome Kohn, 428–46. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994. Arthur, Paul. “Jargons of Authenticity (Three American Moments).” Theorizing Documentary 1 (1993): 108–34. Berenger, Ralph. “Introduction: Global Media Go to War.” In Global Media Go To War: Roles of News and Entertainment Media During the 2003 Iraq War, edited by Ralph Berenger, xxvii–1.Washington, DC: Marquette Books, 2004. Bolter, Jay David. “Remediation and the Desire for Immediacy.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 6, no. 1 (2000): 62–71. doi:10.1177/135485650000600107. Broomberg, Adam, and Oliver Chanarin. “Unconcerned but Not Indifferent,” Foto8, March 4, 2008. http://www.foto8.com/live/unconcerned-but-not-indifferent/#.UkBttbyxOwk. Coalition for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans. “Public Awareness Poll: Needs and Support for our OIF/OEF Military and Veteran Community.” Cohen Research Group, October 2010. http://www.cohenresearchgroup.com/media/ciav_201006.pdf. Descartes, Rene. Meditations on First Philosophy. Translated by John Cottingham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Fisher, B. Aubrey. Perspectives on Human Communication. New York: Macmillan, 1978. Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Gardner, Howard. Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed: Educating for Virtues in the Twenty-first Century. New York: Basic Books, 2012. Gilbertson, Ashley. “The Consequences of War: A Photographer’s Perspective.” PBS.Org, June 6, 2011. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/culture/the-consequences-of-war-aphotographers-perspective/9675/. Gournelos, Ted, and Viveca Greene, eds. A Decade of Dark Humor: How Comedy, Irony, and Satire Shaped Post-9/11 America. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011. Hariman, Robert. “Watching War Evolve: Photojournalism and New Forms of Violence.” In The Violence of the Image: Photography and International Conflict, edited by Liam Kennedy and Caitlin Patrick, 139–63. London: I. B. Tauns, 2013. Hoskins, Andrew, and Amy Holdsworth. “Media Archaeology of/in the Museum.” In Michelle Henning, (ed.) Museum Media, 23–41. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015. Hynes, Samuel. The Soldier’s Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War. New York: Allen Lane, 1997. John, Nicholas. “Sharing and Web 2.0: The Emergence of a Keyword.” New Media and Society 15, no. 2 (2013): 167–82. doi:10.1177/1461444812450684. Kennedy, Liam. “Photojournalism and Warfare in a Postphotographic Age.” Photography and Culture 8, no. 2 (2015): 1–13. doi:10.1080/17514517.2015.1076242.

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Lanham, Richard A. The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Larson, Thomas. “Introduction to Focus: Memoir Now—A New Kind of Narrative Truth.” American Book Review 30 no. 3 (2009): 3. doi:10.1353/abr.2009.0029. ———. The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007. Lobinger, Katharina. “Photographs as Things–Photographs of Things: A Texto-Material Perspective on Photo-Sharing Practices.” Information, Communication and Society 19, no. 4 (2015): 1–14. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2015.1077262. Lyons, Martyn. “A New History from Below? The Writing Culture of Ordinary People in Europe.” History Australia 7, no. 3 (2010): 59–61. Manaugh, Geoff. “War/Photography: An Interview with Simon Norfolk.” BLDGBLOG, December 1, 2006. http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2006/11/warphotography-interview-with-simon.html. Nemeth, Mike, Shaun Wheelwright, and Larry Smith, eds. Six-Word War: Six-Word Stories from a Generation at War in Iraq and Afghanistan. 2nd ed. New York: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014. Peters, John Durham. Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Plato. Phaedrus. Translated by Christopher Rowe. New York: Penguin Classics, 2005. Ritchie, Jessica. “Instant Histories of War: Online Combat Videos of the Iraq Conflict, 2003–2010.” History Australia 8 (2011): 89–108. http://journals.publishing.monash.edu/ojs /index.php/ha/article/view/642/659. Ritchin, Fred. After Photography. New York: Norton, 2008. Shane, Leo. “A Glimpse of War, Hemmingway-style.” Stars and Stripes, August 8, 2013. http://www.stripes.com/news/a-glimpse-of-war-hemingway-style-1.234456. Silvestri, Lisa. “Book Review: Memes in Digital Culture by Limor Schifman.” Memes and Digital Culture. Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture12, no. 1 (2014): 198–200. ———. Friended at the Front: Social Media in the American War Zone. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015. ———. “Shiny Happy People Holding Guns: 21st Century Images of War.” Visual Communication Quarterly 20, no. 2 (2014): 106–18. doi:10.1080/15551393.2014.928159. ———. “Surprise Homecomings and Vicarious Sacrifices.” Media, War and Conflict 6, no. 2 (2013): 101–15. doi:10.1177/1750635213476407. Six-Word War. “About.” Accessed April 29, 2015. http://www.sixwordwar.com/about. ———. “Homepage.” Accessed April 29, 2015. http://www.sixwordwar.com/. Tompkins, Paula S. “Truth, Trust, and Telepresence.” Journal of Mass Media Ethics 18, no.3 (2003): 194–212. doi:10.1080/08900523.2003.9679664. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Wright, Frederick A. “The Short Story Just Got Shorter: Hemingway, Narrative, and the SixWord Urban Legend.” Journal of Popular Culture 47, no. 2 (2014): 327–40. doi:10.1111/ j.1540-5931.2012.00935.x.

NOTES 1. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays (First and Second Series), (Stilwell, KS: Digireads.com, 2007), 74. 2. Gardner, Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed. 3. Six-Word War, “Homepage,” para. 1. 4. Ibid., “About,” para. 1. 5. Shane, “A Glimpse,” para. 4. 6. For more on the history of Hemingway’s six words, see Wright, “The Short Story Just Got Shorter.”

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7. Nemeth, Wheelwright, and Smith, Six-Word War. In an introductory note penned by one of the book’s editors, Wheelwright writes, “This project stated as an idea for troops to find their truths and maybe find some help with their emotional recovery” (p. ii). It is also worth noting that Hemingway’s six words needed to rhetorically construct a context, whereas the veterans’ six words join a pre-existing war context. 8. Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy. 9. Tompkins, “Truth, Trust, and Telepresence,” 195 (emphasis added). 10. Peters, Speaking Into the Air, 266. Peters is channeling William James. 11. Ritchie, “Instant Histories of War.” 12. Hynes, The Soldier’s Tale. 13. Andersen, “Images of War,” 97. 14. Silvestri, “Shiny Happy People Holding Guns.” 15. Berenger, “Introduction: Global Media Go to War.” 16. Kennedy, “Photojournalism and Warfare in a Postphotographic Age.” Kennedy describes the current condition as the “postphotographic age.” See also Ritchin, After Photography. 17. Hariman, “Watching War Evolve,” 155. 18. Kennedy, “Photojournalism and Warfare,” 4. 19. Gilbertson, “The Consequences of War,” para. 2; see also Manaugh, “War/Photography.” 20. Broomberg and Chanarin, “Unconcerned but Not Indifferent,” 2nd Prize General News section, para 2. 21. For a fuller discussion of twenty-first-century war narratives see especially the concluding chapter of Silvestri, Friended at the Front. 22. Lyons, “A New History from Below,” 59. 23. Nemeth et al., Six-Word War, ii. 24. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 153. 25. Kennedy, “Photojournalism,” 6. 26. Ironic or not, one of the most common themes among the six-word contributions is the theme of waste or pointlessness. The stories cited here were contributed respectively by Myles Francis, Joven Osorio, and Anonymous in Nemeth et al., Six-Word War, 6, 37, 79. 27. Gournelos and Greene, A Decade of Dark Humor. 28. For a more complete analysis of the implications of instantaneous communication across fronts, see Silvestri, Friended at the Front. 29. Contributed anonymously in Nemeth et al., Six-Word War, 59. 30. Ibid., 29, as written by Joe Pittman. 31. Silvestri, “Book Review.” 32. Anden-Papadopoulos, “US Soldiers Imaging the Iraq War on YouTube,” 26. 33. According to John, “The word that describes our participation in Web 2.0 is sharing.” “Sharing and Web 2.0,” 168 (emphasis added). 34. Bolter, “Remediation and the Desire for Immediacy.” See also Arthur, “Jargons of Authenticity.” 35. Larson, The Memoir and the Memoirist, 16. 36. Ritchie writes about combat videos on YouTube as offering “instant histories of war”: “Instant Histories of War,” 89. 37. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 131. 38. The stories cited here were contributed by Russ Goehring, Patrick Wiley, and Anonymous, respectively, in Nemeth et al., Six-Word War, 7, 16, 19. 39. Lanham, The Economics of Attention; and Silvestri, “Surprise Homecomings.” 40. Ritchie, “Instant Histories,” 92. 41. Nemeth et al. Six-Word War, iii. 42. Coalition for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans, “The Public Awareness Poll.” 43. Ackerman, “Why dialogue?”, 8. 44. Tompkins, “Truth, Trust, and Telepresence,” 208 (emphasis added). 45. The collective “memoir” for two wars, each more than a decade long, is roughly 3,600 words.

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46. Forty-two out of 137 backers fell into the veteran-only categories, making up roughly 30 percent of the financial support for the book. 47. Arendt, “Concern with Politics.” In her essay, Arendt described the inextricable link between communication and truth. She said communication is not an “expression” of thoughts or feelings, which then could be secondary to them, but that truth itself is communicative and disappears outside of communication. 48. To see the Kickstarter campaign, visit https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ 1991002567/six-word-war-our-nations-first-crowdsourced-war-me/description. 49. Lobinger, “Photographs as Things–Photographs of Things.” 50. Plato, Phaedrus. 51. Hoskins and Holdsworth, “Media Archaelogy of/in the Museum,” 23–41. The authors describe “the connective turn” as “the sudden abundance, pervasiveness, and immediacy of communication networks, nodes, and digital media content” (p. 23). 52. Larson, “Introduction to Focus: Memoir Now, ” 3.

IV

Visual Media, Art, and Aesthetics

Chapter Nine

A Special Kind of Authenticity The Portrayal of Civilian Deaths and Injuries in Vernacular Soldier Photography Makeda Best

In early photographic war documentation, the artistic manipulation of subject matter in order to produce more narratively and symbolically engaging images made up for the technical limitations of a medium that was too slow to capture movement, and whose processes were too sensitive to withstand prolonged exposure to the natural elements. In portraying and interpreting the meaning of death in particular, early war photographers used manipulations in order to contextualize and shape the viewer’s interpretation of potentially bewildering subject matter. Following its display in a London gallery, the Journal of the Photographic Society of London singled out Roger Fenton’s Crimean War landscape photograph titled Valley of the Shadow of Death after a line from a popular poem by Alfred Tennyson. 1 In response to Fenton’s portrayal of a desolate landscape with a curving road strewn with cannonballs emerging from the center of the composition, the reviewer described the image as filled with “terrible suggestions, not merely those awakened in the memory but actually brought material before the eyes, by the photographic reproduction of the cannonballs lying strewed like the moraines of a melted glacier through the bottom of the valley.” 2 Of course, Fenton, seeking a more compelling image, had worked with his assistants to painstakingly roll the cannon balls into place, thus transforming what had been an empty road. Early photographers understood their work could hardly meet audience expectations of narrative and symbolic clarity, and that they could not compete with the drama of eyewitness illustrations without some degree of fabrication (or evocative allusions to literature). 149

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By contrast, into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, government control and censorship, rather than the direct intervention by photographers, has shaped the photographic visual culture and thus the public perception of contemporary wars, their impact and aftermath. Since the Vietnam War when the independent photojournalist played a pivotal role in producing images that influenced public opinion, government officials sought to regain control over war narratives and to circumscribe media access through coordinated “embed” programs. 3 In the digital camera and social media age, individuals have found ways to circumvent official restrictions. Dora Apel cites the very ease and wide accessibility of photographic image production and channels of distribution as reasons: “soldiers, civilians, insurgents, and refugees have the capability of documenting war with photos and videos taken with their cell phones or other small digital cameras that can be immediately transmitted.” 4 Government officials recognize the power of this documentation too however, and have engaged in monitoring and censorship. As of 2005, military bloggers inside Iraq have been required to register, and the United States Army has convened an Army Risk Assessment Cell to monitor compliance. 5 In America, instances in which visual evidence of the realities of these wars and the implications of foreign policy present themselves to the public have met with swift intervention or response by government officials in order to control the meaning and interpretation, especially in regards to violence and death. A study of the types of subject matter published following the 9/11 attacks and subsequent military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, quantified the military’s success at controlling the kinds of subjects they wanted the public to see. 6 In 2009, when the Associated Press published photographer Julie Jacobson’s photograph of a dying American solider (a rarely published subject since the Vietnam War), it caused a national uproar and provoked condemnation from Defense Secretary Robert Gates. In a scathing letter to the AP, Gates wrote: “The American people understand that death is an awful and inescapable part of war,” and the choice to publish the photograph was an “unconscionable departure from the restraint that most journalists and publications have shown covering the military since September 11th.” 7 Other than the “roll calls” of the dead (with the official portrait photographs of service members along with their rank and details like the name of their hometowns) and the moments of silence following featured on such news programs as the PBS Newshour, government policy has sharply curtailed public access to visual documentation of dead American servicemen. Until 2009, policy banned the media from photographing the coffins carrying the bodies and remains of American soldiers at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. 8 Intended to protect the privacy of families, the regulations in effect promoted the fiction of the capacities of technological waged war without casualties. To a greater degree than the deaths of American

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service members, American government officials continue to distort the facts about the deaths and injuries of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. This essay examines contemporary vernacular photographic war documentation and the portrayal of civilian deaths and injuries. Other scholars have convincingly addressed the scopic aspects of contemporary warfare, but this essay seeks to focus on the emerging role of vernacular imagery produced by amateurs, which has only continued to expand due to the rise of social media and the diminished role of professional photojournalists as primary sources of visual documentation. Judith Butler asserts: “The question for war photography . . . concerns not only what it shows, but also how it shows what it shows.” 9 She describes the photograph as a “structuring scene of interpretation—and one that may unsettle both the maker and viewer in its turn.” 10 In Jason Hartley’s photographically illustrated “milblog” Just Another Soldier, 11 his personal photographic documentation and texts unsettle the structuring ideologies of the wars in the Middle East, and myths about death and modern warfare. As an illustrated document, the blog is unusual in the direct access it provides the public to a soldiers’ experience. The blog indirectly addresses an issue American officials and its allied coalition have sought to downplay: civilians deaths and injuries. In this essay, I attend to the formal attributes of these vernacular images in order to locate how image making tropes and techniques influence meaning and the site visitor’s identification with Hartley and his work, in order to understand how the blog informs site visitors about a controversial subject. The American wars in the Middle East, known for their spectacular qualities as opposed to intimate documentation, have posed distinct challenges to visual documentation. The first Persian Gulf War combined stealth technology, precision munitions, and cruise missile technology, observed Martin Cook and Mark Conversino, and “amazed the world with a vision of fundamentally new ways of using airpower.” 12 Paul Virillio’s Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light cogently situates the visual culture of the first Gulf War as the culmination of history of the representation of warfare based on the spectacle of special effects that first emerged in World War II. More recently, in “War Porn,” Jean Baudrillard described the images from the September 11, 2001, World Trade Center attacks as “illustrations of a power which, reaching its extreme point, no longer knows what to do with itself.” 13 The ways in which contemporary wars strategically link military technology and information technology as tools of warfare and visual propaganda is unprecedented, but the lived aspect of the war experience and its direct documentation continue to also deserve our attention. Milblogs like Just Another Soldier form a subgenre of the war blog. The Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang specifically dates the origins of the term “war blog” to the wars of Afghanistan and Iraq following the 2001 World Trade Center attacks. 14 The war blog can take any number of

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textual forms, and can be written by authors from a range of occupations and perspectives, but Liam Kennedy identifies the subgenre “milblog” to describe first person web accounts of American troops at war. 15 Some milblogs are more diaristic and text based, and others focus more on telling experiences through a combination of found photographs, personal photographs and text posts. Blogs address common themes. They chronicle everyday life in the military, the local landscapes and historic sites, and bonding between soldiers. Kennedy writes that in addition to functioning as personal diaries, milblogs allow military personnel to communicate with family and friends, and that the relatively instantaneous communication helps to sustain morale. 16 Family and friends are not always necessarily the sole intended audience. Some seek to raise funds for various causes. In examples such as Colby Buzzell’s My War: Killing Time in Iraq, the desire to correct misconceptions and provide the broader public with the “truth” about contemporary life as a soldier contributed to his decision to create the blog. During their most active periods, Buzzell’s blog and others, including BlackFive, 17 found wide audiences. Sometimes long after the blog author has ceased writing, the site continues to be active with visitors and commentary. Just Another Soldier began in 2001 as a personal blog, but presented in the public space of the web, it soon evolved into a public site of discussion, and media attention contributed to its eventual transformation into book form in 2006. Before the book was published, the Pentagon ordered Hartley to shut the blog down, which he did for a short time before resuming again without permission—an act that earned him a demotion in rank. 18 The subtitle of the blog is “A Year on the Ground in Iraq.” Hartley’s use of the phrase “on the ground” promises site visitors something unavailable in the mainstream media. Interactions with civilians, and the use of only personal photographs as opposed to a mix of personal photographs, graphics and news images featured in such milblogs as Skull Nation in the Sandbox, 19 is what distinguishes Just Another Soldier. As the role and imagery of professional photojournalism continues to shift due to factors including the increasing reliance on aerial weaponry, Just Another Soldier is an example of how personal photographs made by soldiers can provide the immediate perspective once captured by professionals. Yet, soldier photography, however personal, by definition lacks the objective distance of professional photography. The democratization and the normalization of military rhetoric and activities through the act of photography potentially elide this fact. In a chapter on milblogs and the Second Iraq War, Bailey, Cammaert, and Carpentier explore blogs according to what they identify as hegemonic and anti-hegemonic messages. 20 The hegemonic milblog is not a critique of mainstream media’s hegemony, but reinforces the discourse of war and its classic dichotomies. 21 Military officials have been eager to

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exploit the image production of soldiers. The annual Military Photographer of the Year award, issued under the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, honors soldier photographers. The subject matter of competition honorees tend to enforce the idea of the bonds between soldiers, and the character building aspects of military life—with unexpected and lighthearted moments such as soldiers with dogs or other animals. More recently, officials have supported new media production. The New Media Outreach Program of the Department of Defense is an example of how officials seek to harness blogging for their uses. Pointing to Buzzell’s work as an example, Bailey et al. assert the counter hegemonic blog contradicts the heroization of American soldiers by, for example, “narrativising the ordinariness of their activities.” 22 There are other ways blogs can indirectly support common beliefs about war and the military. Portraying the human side of soldiers and humanity in military life, milblogs can function as credible and effective advocates for military operations. 23 The milblog that combines vernacular photographs and texts provides visual evidence to enforce and expand its messages and themes. Susan Sontag once described photography as a medium with the capacity to “democratize” experience by turning everything into a photograph. 24 Kennedy links soldier photography to a “tourist” mode of photographic production. 25 Like the tourist, the service member is “away” from home, and photography functions as a tool for personal documentation and a structuring activity. Indeed, many have linked the tourist photograph to the violence of the hunter’s violent acquisition of animal trophies. 26 Visitors to the site are tourists too. Visitors come to the site to experience, and Hartley offers them souvenirs in the form of authentic visual and textual observations. It is important to attend to the aesthetic of tourist photography in addition to its cultural function. These amateur images uniquely engage with audiences through their modes of storytelling. Visitors to the site recognize the aesthetic from their own photographic practices. Hartley’s photographs expose their status through various aesthetic tropes. As opposed to the objective distance and efforts at visual contextualization that distinguish the professional photographer, Hartley’s images are marked by particular formal attributes and narrative maneuvers as well. Vernacular aesthetic tropes can be identified in such as aspects as choice of subject matter, the placement and function of figures, formal aspects such as graininess, and uneven or abrupt cropping and framing of images. There are no dynamic angles. Subjects are focused, and there is little interest in pictorially establishing and exploring multiple points of view. Each shot is made from a similar distance. Captions are not always fully explanatory or particularly evocative of the scene they relate to. Without their captions, many of the photographs appear routine, and their narrative and informative function is unclear. The photographically illustrated blog normalizes military activity

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through enactment of common photographic techniques and tropes familiar to amateur photographers. Even the choice to narrate ones experience with photographic illustration aligns such projects with diaries and personal slideshows. Sontag writes of the way in which war images “have been reproached for being a way of watching suffering at a distance.” 27 Through the images and the diaristic text, the site visitor identifies with Hartley’s position. The site visitor is part of the story too. The photography in Just Another Soldier engages visitors through its formal attributes that convey authenticity. Hartley is an amateur, and the photography that follows adopts the vernacular tourist mode of the photographer traveler similar to that of the portrait that opens the blog. Sontag pointed out that despite their lack of professionalism, “less polished pictures” possess a “special kind of authenticity.” 28 The lack of polish in these vernacular photographs are in direct contrast to what Dora Apel describes as the “official framing of war” in which only approved images support “the war machinery, producing and enforcing a particular reality while actively excluding alternative views.” 29 As a representative of the nation’s military forces, he is no ordinary amateur. Hartley is both an amateur and a soldier. The site visitor feels an attachment to Hartley, despite the fact that he is presenting but one perspective. Sontag argues that for photographs of violence and atrocity, the amateur image has a special allure: “For the photography of atrocity, people want the weight of witnessing without taint of artistry, which is equated with insincerity or mere contrivance. Pictures of hellish events seem more authentic when they don’t have the look that comes from being ‘properly’ lighted and composed.” 30 In Hartley’s case, his images may be authentic, but his perspective is influenced by the work he has chosen and his membership within an organization representing a particular ideology. It is this struggle between himself as a witness and himself as a serviceman, precipitated largely by the incidents involving the civilians that he encounters, that emerges as an important theme in the blog. In his choice of a title, Just Another Soldier, Hartley acknowledges his position as an anonymous member of a large and complex organization known for its emphasis on conformity and as the embodiment of widely held cultural beliefs about manhood. He is “just another”—he is not a high ranking serviceman, but an average serviceman. Hartley knows that the word “soldier” has both definite meanings and images associated with it. “Soldiering is boring work with scarce and brief moments of intensity. I’m in for the long haul. There isn’t going to be a tidy coda after two hours of Josh Hartnett mugging for the camera. Credits won’t ever roll and house lights don’t go up for a long long time,” he writes. 31 Hartley informs the site visitors that he is acutely aware of popular visual culture and its image of “what war looks like.” By acknowledging that he is representative of both a large organization

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and of particular cultural ideas and ideals, that he is an individual, he further connects with site visitors. Photography’s central and contradictory function as forms of illustration, confirmation, evidence, and symbol is established in the first blog entry, which features only a photograph. Dated September 2001, the grainy color vertical portrait made at night portrays Hartley, in uniform, standing in the rubble of the World Trade Center. 32 The massive iconic shells of the destroyed buildings with their jagged edges can be seen in the background behind Hartley. The bright light used to illuminate the site at night frames the remains from below. The lights remind the site visitor of the presence of the nonstop work of the unseen rescue workers. Hartley is directly associated with the labor and emotions at the scene, even though we do not know why he was there or what his exact role was. The post’s heading (which also implicitly serves as the photograph’s caption since a caption is not provided) reads simply: “A day in September, 2001.” The date demonstrates to the site visitor how the event has informed Hartley’s identity, and Hartley’s intimacy with its horrors. Through the photograph, Hartley suggests the event’s impact on his life, and his life’s direction. It is the only photograph from 2001. From there, the blog jumps to 2003 when Hartley is into his deployment. Placed at the beginning of the blog, it suggests his transformation, or a beginning, for Hartley. Hartley’s choice of pictorial associations resonates with the site visitor, as does the idea of September 11 as the motivating factor for his service. Suited up for combat, it no longer matters what he was actually doing at the site. The common feelings he establishes with the site visitor overrides this question. Hartley offers the site visitor the opportunity to vicariously experience the retaliation the public articulated and that was encouraged. From the first of nearly seventy posts, the production of an untimely photograph informs the narrative of the story and serves as its narrative and emotional organizing aid. By identifying September 11 as the point of origin, violence and death form the thematic foundation of the blog. Separating each blog entry is a graphic icon of an assault rifle. The site visitor moves from the deaths of Americans and scrolls through the image of the rifle, suggesting the death of the perpetrators of these acts that are yet to come. Civilians are an implicitly part of this process of retribution. The official and popular rhetoric of the aftermath of the attacks did not exclude civilian sentiment: “we” lost civilians and ostensibly the necessary process of retribution means “they” will too. Violence and death surface in the posts in various ways. Women sit frightened along walls of structures waiting for home inspections to end or crying during raids. On strangely desolate streets, Hartley points out potential danger (such as buildings with ramparts). Hartley posts photographs of craters left over from IEDs (improvised explosive devices). In one post, he explains that insurgents use dead animals to hide bombs, and that part of their

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work is to set fire to dead animals. In a sequence of images, he shows a dead dog on the side of a road, and then the corpse on fire. Death and violence are dominant themes, but their form does not resemble expectations, its context eludes documentation, and its meaning to the war policy and its objectives are difficult to explain. This is especially true in specific photographs that address the injuries, near deaths, and deaths of citizens and presumed combatants during Hartley’s tour. The primary focus of Hartley’s experiences with near death and death come through interactions with civilians rather than identified combatants. 33 The alarming loss of civilian lives has been an issue since the first Gulf War. In 1991, Human Rights Watch published its report on the issue, alarmingly titled “Needless Deaths in the Gulf War: Civilian Casualties During the Air Campaign and Violations of the Laws of War.” 34 The issue of civilian deaths in the Middle East wars continues to be contentious. Though observers disagree on the numbers, they do agree that the number of civilian dead has been disproportionately high. By some estimates, for every one death of a soldier, eleven civilians are killed. 35 Such numbers dispute the efficacy of modern warfare’s supposed precision-based tactics. 36 War’s impact on civilians upend official rhetoric about technology driven tactics that are supposedly discriminate, proportionate, capable of distinguishing civilians and civilian objects, and limiting collateral damage. 37 Early in Barack Obama’s presidency, the United Nations condemned his administration for its role in increasing rather than curbing the high numbers of civilian deaths and injuries in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. 38 Human rights observers have also criticized the administration’s use of drones, and the numbers of civilians that have been injured or killed in these attacks. 39 Hartley posted an entry titled “I ♥ Dead Civilians,” perhaps one of the most controversial sections of the blog. 40 The use of “I ♥” absurdly references the advertising slogan often used on cheap tourist goods and by tourist boards. He writes: “I’m having a hard time being okay with all the dead civilians. But it happens so often. It’s like we should have bumper stickers that read, ‘I ♥ Dead Civilians.’” 41 The phrase perhaps functions as a personal coping mechanism, but it also links Hartley to his own status as a tourist. In this photograph, these “not dead” civilians could so easily have not been. Since dead civilians (or others whose status as combatants was indefinite) were a too common reality for the war, and Hartley’s phrase only emphasizes the complex relationship of that fact to the war effort and to the men charged with fighting it. Hartley is uncomfortable with the kind of violence he witnesses. In this case, a family has been killed. In the caption for the image he writes: I’ve been painstakingly mulling over in my mind the things these insurgents do and the things we, the US Army do and the unintuitive peculiarity of how

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the drive to be violent seems to precede the purpose to be violent and how rampant it is to meaninglessly develop one’s identity through injury, but frankly I don’t think I’ve figured it all out well enough yet to even kludge together a coherent line of thought. 42

He also admits he wished he would have been able to see the scene, “to bear witness I suppose.” 43 This certificate of Hartley’s presence is also evidence. Citing Roland Barthes, Woodward and Jenkings describe how the solider photographs posted on milblogs function as “certificates of presence.” 44 In the Barthesian sense, the photographs truly are evidence of presence as opposed to resemblance. The images certify what for Hartley did not transpire, when all other evidence leading up to the event all but confirmed it would end differently. The series also offers another kind of evidence—evidence of haphazard policy and persistent errors in a technology-driven war. On August 7, 2004, in a post titled “I Still ♥ Dead Civilians (Well, These Aren’t Quite Dead),” Hartley posted photographs of what he describes as the “family we almost wasted.” 45 The photographs were made at night, and Hartley does not explain the circumstances that led to the family almost being killed. Hartley’s portrayal of the family in smaller groupings rather than one large group photograph (a pictorial trope that traditionally communicates the familial group) adds to the sense of their documentary aesthetic. These photographs are for his personal uses, and the goal of them is not to convey the family’s perspective. Made at close proximity with very little other contextual details in the picture frame, these portraits of sorts depict disoriented men of various ages whose gazes are not quite fixed. Their white tunics are dirty. The blood on the shirt of one man is the only evidence of the violent encounter to which Hartley alludes. The distraught looking women sitting in the background also suggest various scenarios and the emotions on the scene. The post features two photographs of pairs of men, and the last one is of a small boy Hartley describes as the “Photo of a cute Iraqi kid who I almost shot but didn’t mean to.” 46 The image is jarring—such almost dead civilians also include small “cute” kids. The boy’s innocence is underscored by his clothing: a polo shirt with skateboard figures and the word “skate” imprinted throughout. Hartley’s power as both the person with the ability to take their lives and their pictures is implicit in Hartley’s observation about one of the young men that “He is trying to make a straight face, but at the moment I took this picture, he was hating on me hard.” 47 The “I Still ♥ Dead Civilians” post is not the only instance where the issue of the power and the violence of photographic documentation and of warfare converge. “You Can’t Shoot Kids” illustrates the aesthetics of tourist photography and of warfare. The fixed gaze and angles at which Hartley photographs groups of three young boys who casually pose for him is eerily reminiscent of the gun sights at the same time as it references a simple

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snapshot. In his caption, Hartley describes them as “Photos of the week of cute Iraqi kids who I want to shoot. Something I can not [sic] reiterate often enough is how monumentally misbehaved Iraqi street kids are. But some of them are just so darn cute, you can’t help but want to squeeze their little faces—until they suffocate.” 48 It is as if Hartley is like any Western tourist on vacation, but he is not. Hartley’s tone is ever more haunting here since children were and continue to be disproportionately impacted by modern conflicts. Most of the Iraqis Hartley records are women, children, and older men, which provides a sense of the social landscape of this war. Despite the title “The Most Offensive Thing I saw in Iraq,” the aesthetic of the photographs of a scene inside of an Iraqi home appear banal. 49 Hartley’s title emphasizes the horror that his photographs cannot sufficiently communicate. Here, he has born witness to something, and he enforces that point. Moreover, through the title, the photograph itself becomes the “most offensive thing” he saw, since it is a direct representation of what he saw. In the first picture, a group of a dozen or so American soldiers stand in the clearing in front of a clay structure talking. In the subsequent two photographs, the bodies of the two dead men appear in the doorways. Unlike the professional photograph, the amateur photograph does not trace events. While one man is severely bloodied, the other man does not have any apparent wounds. The other photographs depict a room in a clay walled structure with a dirt floor. The vertical orientation of the images, the visible doorway frame partially obscuring our access to the scene, and the down facing vantage point, position the us in the scene. The bodies of two men lie on the ground. As opposed to the full context of the narrative, the amateur photographer often only presents visual fragments. Like other deaths he presents on the blog, Hartley is unsure of whom the dead men are or the course of events that led to the deaths: “The only fact that I am certain of is that two men were killed. I also trust that there was an explosion or grenade. I was a part of the force that responded to the event. The rest is hearsay and conjecture.” 50 As in the tourist photography, photography here gives shape and coherence to a confusing experience. 51 Without any information, the dead men are just another detail in the photograph. Barbie Zelizer’s About to Die: How News Images Move the Public identifies and analyzes the genre of the “as if” photograph to refer to photographs that portray the moment of impending death. Drawing the site visitors in rather than enforcing distance as photographs of the dead do, Zelizer writes that the as-if photograph “forces attention even though people know more than what it shows.” 52 The people in Hartley’s blog have escaped impending death, but the site visitor knows this was only by luck, and that circumstances of this conflict are such that another such encounter may happen again, and this family may not survive (if indeed they are not already survivors). More so than a professional photograph in the newspaper, Hartley’s site visitors

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have developed a relationship with him through his images. The site visitor learns to identify and even vicariously occupy Hartley’s position. These facts compound the function of Hartley’s images: it is by chance that these people are alive for us to see them, but we may not see these people again. The rhetorical force of the image lies in part in what is the events that are now past and in what is potentially yet to occur. Deaths of civilians and injuries to civilians seem to occur without reason. Hartley documents a weary looking young man whom “we thought was an insurgent” and who they shot in the abdomen, and subsequently treated for his injuries. 53 This is another instance on the blog where the photograph functions as an indirect comparison between official language and Hartley’s contradictory visual evidence. “We thought” suggests Hartley’s team was provided with faulty information by some higher up source. The photograph seems to suggest the degree to which this information was unreliable, since the man does not appear to be a threat. The man appears in the photograph shirtless. He is not an empowered combatant but alone, thin, and defenseless. Down the middle of the man’s lower body is a large wound, held together by neat stitches. An American medic bends and appears to be examining the stitches with a stethoscope. Their medical assistance implies guilt for their “mistake.” Even though Hartley seems relieved the man did not die, as with the other posts, the identity of this man is unknown. A few other posts portray American soldiers frantically providing medical assistance to people sometimes only identified as “wounded Iraqis.” The vernacular photograph is not just meaningful at the moment in which it is made, but during the time following as well. 54 The focus of the vernacular photograph extends beyond immediate documentation, and they serve as sites of rumination and discussion long after the actual event has taken place. Writing about a photograph of the crumpled body of a man in a bloody white tunic he posed in “I ♥ Dead Civilians,” Hartley calls them “the family in the truck who were killed” and writes that he was not there when they died: “I wish I had been there, to bear witness I suppose. So tell me, why would I wish for this?” 55 One commenter posted in response: “Is this a joke or what? This whole blog gives a bad taste in the mouth.” 56 Though in the original post Hartley admits he is unsure of what he is writing about the situation, in response to the comment one year later he responded: “It leaves a bad taste in your mouth? That’s sorta the point.” The photograph’s direct contribution to a narrative is not the point: the point of the vernacular photograph is its use as a broader tool of exploration of other issues. In this case, the issue is the very goal of the blog itself. Though first posted in 2004, the post continued to receive comments through as late as 2010, when one commenter posted, “I love this..[sic] It’s so brutally honest. This is what he sees on a daily basis.” 57 The blog format extends the life of the photograph—eliminating the “that has been” quality of the analog photograph. As we learn more and more about

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the dynamics, circumstances, and histories of these conflicts, our relationship to and interpretation of such imagery changes. The force of meaning of these images finally lies in Hartley’s own identity as the creator. The series reminds site visitors of the nature of Hartley’s work and his mission, despite the funny photographs of him and members of his squad playing tricks on one another or his documentation of their basecamp. His position gives him the authority to enter the homes and to make the documentation that he does. Woodward and Jenkings observe, “There is always a tension between the fact that military personnel act within the broad conventions and expectations of social norms, and the fact that they quite specifically do not.” 58 At the same time, the series forces the site visitor to consider just what exactly the mission is, and why little of what Hartley presents has anything to do with fighting so-called enemies, let alone the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks. Hartley’s representations of these civilians may seem to be motivated purely by desires of personal documentation, but given Hartley’s identity and the context, these posts take on a distinct meaning. We must remember, as Woodward and Jenkings remind us, that the military is an organization invested by the state with the responsibility for the execution of legitimized violence. 59 While visitors may identify with Hartley through this illustrated diary, Hartley also directly reminds site visitors of his own role in the war he documents and the violence he participates in. In his October 9, 2004, post, “‘5.56mm vs. 7.62mm on 1/4’ Steel,” Hartley records the impact of cartridges from M4, AK-47, and M24 rifles. The site visitor need not know the difference between the rifles. In fact, the site visitor’s lack of knowledge is anticipated. The post reminds the visitor that despite how we identify with him through his blog, we are not like him. The simple photograph, featuring two pieces of steel, each filled with massive holes and carefully labeled texts identifying which firearm corresponds with which hole. Hartley explains that each of the steel slabs, with holes peeled back where the bullet entered, is a quarter inch thick. 60 Although not all of the shots penetrated the steel, each still inflicted considerable damage to the slab. Though Hartley sticks to explaining the impact of the different projectiles, the idea of these hitting human bodies is uneasily present as well. Another photograph, made at closer range and from the side, further communicates the strength of these bullets and the thickness of the steel into which they were fired. Despite the September 11 photograph and the bullets in the iron slabs, Hartley does not romanticize his work. The photographs may normalize his narrative, but he reminds us of just how tenuous the truths they offer are. “In real life I’m a geek. I’ve never read Black Hawk Down. I miss the city and I just want to get back and finish school. This ‘war on terror’ crap has totally ruined my semester. Okay, at least this time I have an enemy. Now who was it again?” 61 Hartley singles out one encounter in particular. The photograph

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depicts a young bearded man with close cropped hair lying on his side. 62 The photograph is last in a series of images depicting injured Iraqi men. The ubiquitous red time stamp in digital font at the bottom right of the image adds a diaristic element. The time stamp confers various degrees of definitiveness to the image. The stamp confers that the image exists. A holdover from the pre-digital era, the stamp still maintains a connection to an actual photograph. Like many of the activities Hartley describes in his blog, the scene is hardly heroic. The injured men and the dead man do not wear uniforms. The dead man wears a striped short-sleeve polo shirt. If these are “enemies,” there is little about them that indicate this is the case. Made at close proximity, the photograph of the dead man is like a portrait. Hartley is unsure of who the man was or the circumstances that led to his death, only that he and others tried to move him, dropped him, and that this probably caused the gashes on his head. The blood has stained his shirt to such a degree that it is not immediately clear that the shirt is actually grey. The strange angle at which his arm folds underneath him tells of additional injury. The man’s body is stiff, and his eyes aren’t closed as much as they appear heavily sealed. Hartley writes that he thinks often of the man’s face, the first dead man he had ever seen, and he reflected on the image in 2012: He’s a stranger to me, but he’s very real and very human. Shot by his own countrymen as punishment for working with us, the Americans. It was a barren and desolate place. The walk he took down that gully was his last. What a shitty place to die. He’s a stranger to me, but he’s very real and very human. Shot by his own countrymen as punishment for working with us, the Americans. It was a barren and desolate place. The walk he took down that gully was his last. What a shitty place to die. 63

If, as John Taylor has written, gruesome news photographs offer site visitors the “opportunity to stare,” in this personal vernacular image, the site visitor must contend with Hartley’s own discomfort at what it records. 64 We are not allowed to indulge in voyeurism. According to Robin Kesley, “The social power of tourist photography rests in part on the dubious assumption that the photograph represents what a person standing where the photographer stood would have witnessed at the time the photograph was taken.” 65 Hartley doesn’t quite know what this photograph represents, only that it exists and that the man is dead. The simple snapshot is the opposite of the moral and narrative clarity of Hartley’s self-portrait that day in September 2001. Just Another Soldier inadvertently documents aspects of modern warfare that government officials sought, and continue to seek, to suppress. Attending to the sites of vernacular image production demonstrates how these works, valued as first person accounts, can impact audience perception of events because of their formal attributes. Hartley’s use of irony in his captions and texts reveals to the audience his discomfort with what he is witness-

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ing, and his documentation takes on new meaning when examined within its broader context. His tone alerts the visitor to carefully examine what they are viewing, despite the colloquial aesthetic of the images. Just Another Soldier emerges as an intimate document about death in modern warfare. Judith Butler asks: “Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And finally, What makes for a grievable life?” 66 These are persistent questions in Just Another Soldier. Moreover, for Hartley, the question is also what does it mean to transmit these images, to record them in such familiar terms when they should be utterly unfamiliar? Hartley’s words strain against the normalizing visual rhetoric of photography. More recently, the milblog phenomenon has evolved into more purely social media sites, and for this reason vernacular images still demand careful analysis. Instead of dismissing these as personal visual diaries and snapshots, vernacular aesthetics can reveal how makers negotiate their roles within conflicts, how the rhetoric of warfare is interpreted by servicemen, and the aspects of those conflicts that are suppressed. REFERENCES Apel, Dora. War, Culture, and the Contest of Images. Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012. Bailey, Olga G., Bart Cammaert, and Nico Carpentier. “Blogs in the Second Iraq War: Alternative Media Challenging the Mainstream?” In Understanding Alternative Media, edited by Olga G. Bailey, Bart Cammaert, and Nico Carpentier, 72–83. New York: McGraw Hill, 2007. Barrett, Grant. The Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Baudrillard, Jean. “War Porn.” Journal of Visual Culture 5, no. 1 (April, 2006): 86–88. http:// vcu.sagepub.com/content/5/1/86.full.pdf. Butler, Judith. Frames of War—When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso Books, 2009. ———. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso Books, 2006. Buzzell, Colby. My War: Killing Time in Iraq. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2005. Cook, Martin L,. and Mark Conversino. “Asymmetric Air War: Ethical Implications.” In The Moral Dimension of Asymmetrical Warfare: Counter-Terrorism, Democratic Values and Military Ethics, edited by Th. A. Van Baarda and D. E. M. Verweij, 47–60. Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 2009. Gall, Carlotta, and Taimoor Shah. “Civilian Deaths Imperil Support for Afghan War.” New York Times, May 6, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/07/world/asia /07afghan.html. Hartley, Jason. “‘5.56mm vs. 7.62mm on 1/4’ Steel.” Just Another Soldier (blog). October 9, 2004. Accessed December 8, 2015. http://www.justanothersoldier.com/?p=265. ———. “Blood and Soap.” Just Another Soldier (blog). June 23, 2004. Accessed December 8, 2015. http://www.justanothersoldier.com/?p=34. ———. “The Chicken Farmer Survives!” Just Another Soldier (blog). September 27, 2004. Accessed December 8, 2015. http://www.justanothersoldier.com/?p=323. ———. “Ground Zero.” Just Another Soldier (blog). September 11, 2001. Accessed December 8, 2015. http://www.justanothersoldier.com/?p=151. ———. “I ♥ Dead Civilians.” Just Another Soldier (blog). April 4, 2004. Accessed December 8, 2015. http://www.justanothersoldier.com/?p=30. ———. “I Am Not Josh Hartnett.” Just Another Soldier (blog). November 6, 2003. Accessed December 8, 2015. http://www.justanothersoldier.com/?p=6.

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———. “I Still ♥ Dead Civilians (Well, These Aren’t Quite Dead).” Just Another Soldier (blog). August 7, 2004. Accessed December 8, 2015. http://www.justanothersoldier.com/ ?p=41. ———. “The Most Offensive Thing I Saw in Iraq.” Just Another Soldier (blog). October 15, 2004. Accessed December 8, 2015. http://www.justanothersoldier.com/?p=331. ———. “You Can’t Shoot Kids.” Just Another Soldier (blog). July 30, 2004. Accessed December 8, 2015. http://www.justanothersoldier.com/?p=48. Hockenberry, John. “The Blogs of War.” WIRED, August 8, 2005. http://www.wired.com/ 2005/08/milblogs/. Human Rights Watch. “‘Between a Drone and Al-Qaeda’: The Civilian Cost of US Targeted Killings in Yemen.” October 22, 2003. https://www.hrw.org/report/2013 /10/22/betweendrone-and-al-qaeda/civilian-cost-us-targeted-killings-yemen. ———. “Needless Deaths in the Gulf War: Civilian Casualties During the Air Campaign and Violations of the Laws of War.” November, 1991. https://www.hrw.org/reports/pdfs/u/us/ us.91o/us910full.pdf. Kelsey, Robin. “I Came, I Saw, I Photographed: Tourist Photography’s Fictional Conquest.” Revista: Harvard Review of Latin America (Winter, 2002): 8. Kennedy, Liam. “Soldier Photography: Visualising the War in Iraq.” Review of International Studies 35, no. 5 (October, 2009): 820. doi:10.1017/S0260210509990209. King, Cynthia, and Paul Martin Lester. “Photographic Coverage During the Persian Gulf and Iraqi Wars in Three U.S. Newspapers.” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 82, no. 3 (Autumn, 2005): 623–37. doi:10.1177/107769900508200309. Robinson, Mike, and Doug Picard. The Framed World. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2009. Seelye, Katherine A. “Defense Secretary Gates Criticizes A.P. Over Photo of Marine.” New York Times, September 4, 2009. http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/04/defense-secretary-gates-criticizes-ap-over-photo-of-marine/?_r=0. Shaw, Martin. The New Western Way of War: Risk-Transfer War and Its Crisis in Iraq. New York: Polity Books, 2005. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Penguin, 1977. ———. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador, 2004. Taylor, John. “Caught Looking.” In Body Horror: Photojournalism, Catastrophe and War, 13–28. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998. Urry, John, and Jonas Larsen. The Tourist Gaze, 3.0. 3rd ed. London: Sage Publications, 2011. Virillio, Paul. Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light. Translated by Michael Degener. London: Athlone Press, 2002. Woodward, Rachel, and Neil K. Jenkings. “Soldiers’ Photographic Representations of Participation in Armed Conflict.” In Representations of Peace and Conflict (Rethinking Political Violence), edited by Stephen Gibson and Simon Mollan, 105–19. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Zelizer, Barbie. About to Die—How News Images Move the Public. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

NOTES 1. Journal of the Photographic Society, 34, September 21, 1855. 2. Ibid., 221. 3. Apel, War, Culture, and the Contest of Images, 151–52. 4. Ibid., 143. 5. Hockenberry, “The Blogs of War.” 6. King and Lester, “Photographic Coverage,” 629, 634. 7. Seelye, “Defense Secretary Gates.” 8. The George H. W. Bush administration implemented the policy in 1991 during the first Gulf War. 9. Butler, Frames of War, 71.

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10. Ibid., 67. 11. Posts range from 2001 to 2005; http://www.justanothersoldier.com/. 12. Cook and Conversino, “Asymmetric Air War: Ethical Implications,” 49. 13. Baudrillard, “War Porn,” 86. 14. Barrett, The Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang, 282. 15. Kennedy, “Soldier Photography,” 820. 16. Ibid. 17. Available at http://www.blackfive.net/. 18. Hockenberry, “The Blogs of War.” 19. This site’s entries date from 2005–2006 and 2010–2011; http://skullnationinthesandbox.blogspot.ca/. 20. Bailey et al., “Blogs in the Second Iraq War.” 21. Ibid., 77. 22. Ibid., 78. 23. Kennedy, “Soldier Photography,” 831. 24. Sontag, On Photography, 7. 25. Kennedy, “Soldier Photography,” 10–11. 26. Kelsey, “I Came, I Saw, I Photographed.” 27. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 117. 28. Ibid., 27. 29. Apel, War Culture and the Contest of Images, 152. 30. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 26. 31. Hartley, “I Am Not Josh Hartnett.” 32. Ibid., “Ground Zero.” 33. This is not necessarily the case with all blogs—other blogs feature dramatic accounts of fighting and engagement. 34. Human Rights Watch, “Needless Deaths.” 35. Shaw, The New Western Way of War, 121. 36. Ibid., 117. 37. Cook and Conversino, “Asymmetric Air War: Ethical Implications,” 49–50. 38. Gall and Shah, “Civilian Deaths.” 39. HumanRights Watch, “Between a Drone and Al-Qaeda.” 40. Hartley, “I ♥ Dead Civilians.” This post received numerous comments from site visitors. 41. Ibid., para. 8. 42. Ibid., para. 10. 43. Ibid., para. 9. 44. Woodward and Jenkings, “Soldiers’ Photographic Representations,” 111–12. 45. Hartley, “I Still ♥ Dead Civilians,” para. 1. 46. Ibid., para. 5. 47. Ibid., para. 4. 48. Ibid., “You Can’t Shoot Kids,” para. 1–2. 49. Ibid., “The Most Offensive Thing I Saw in Iraq.” 50. Ibid., para. 3. 51. Urry and Larsen, The Tourist Gaze, 178. 52. Zelizer, About to Die, 24–25. 53. Hartley, “The Chicken Farmer Survives,” para. 1. 54. Robinson and Picard, The Framed World, 19–22. 55. Hartley, “I ♥ Dead Civilians,” para. 9. 56. Ibid. 57. Elaine, comment 20 on Hartley, “I ♥ Dead Civilians.” 58. Woodward and Jenkings, “Soldiers’ Photographic Representations,” 106. 59. Ibid. 60. Hartley, “5.56mm vs. 7.62mm on 1/4’ Steel.” 61. Ibid., “I Am Not Josh Hartnett.” 62. Ibid., “Blood and Soap.” 63. Ibid., para. 4.

A Special Kind of Authenticity 64. Taylor, “Caught Looking,” 16. 65. Kelsey, “I Came, I Saw, I Photographed,” 10. 66. Butler, Precarious Life, 20.

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Chapter Ten

No Doubt The Politics of Photography in Antonioni’s Blow-Up Chris Balaschak

Observation has become with me, of late, a species of necessity. —Edgar Allen Poe, The Murders in the Rue Morgue

In the wake of recent debates in the United States around police violence and concomitant abuses of power, often spurred and evinced by visual imagery (be it videos or photographs), it is timely to reconsider photography’s declarative testimony. While photography’s coupling with truth, and capability to testify, has been debated since the medium’s invention, Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow-Up, albeit narrative cinema, inserted doubt into any naïve acceptance of photography’s evidential qualities by visually analyzing the ways in which photography constructs meaning. Antonioni’s film particularly showed how a photograph is a form of analogical evidence only when it is joined with other photographs in a series. 1 As such, Antonioni framed photographic meaning as obtuse (a “filmic” and extrinsic meaning, as Roland Barthes calls it) rather than obvious (and inherent in the single image). 2 The film’s continuing relevance to discussions of visual truth, however, lies in how Antonioni’s discourse on photography is not only theoretical but also political. Set against the backdrop of the 1960s swinging London, Blow-Up’s narrative suggests real-world Cold War intrigue that reflected the centrality of photographic evidence in the political sphere. Blow-Up not only allowed Antonioni the opportunity to reinvest photography’s coupling with evidence and detection, it was a means to differentiate the moving image from the still and to question the disparate means by which photography structures meaning. 167

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Blow-Up tells the story of a successful fashion photographer, Thomas (David Hemmings), aspiring to transcend his commercial occupations through an insightful documentary photo-book on the working classes and London’s deindustrialized urban conditions. In the course of making photographs for this project, the photographer enters a London park, camera in tow, and voyeuristically captures a couple’s tryst. The resulting photographs, Thomas will later tell his editor Ron, may be an apt ending to the photobook. Thomas tells Ron, of the photographs he has taken but not yet seen, “I’ve got something fab for the end. In the park. I only took them this morning. You’ll get them later on today. It’s very—peaceful. Very still. . . . Well, the rest of the book’ll be pretty violent.” 3 Yet the park experience is clouded in suspicion: the couple appears to have differed greatly in age, and the woman (“the Girl” in Antonioni’s script, played by Vanessa Redgrave) dashes after the fleeing photographer, following his numerous shots, demanding that the exposed film be handed over. As the viewer and Thomas will discover later, the photographer captured more in that verdant park than was apparent at first blush. Only within a later scene, in which Thomas prints and enlarges numerous photographs from his film (the “blow-up” of the title), will the more incidental, perhaps criminal, evidence be furnished. The park scene during which Thomas makes the “peaceful” photographs is a careful cinematographic choreography. Unfolding over the course of several minutes, and in real time, Antonioni established grounds for the film’s viewers to inhabit Thomas’s camera as distinct from the director’s cinematic camera, replete with a diegetic soundtrack: the wind rushing through the lush greenery typical of London, accented occasionally by the photographer’s clicking shutter. At first, Antonioni cleverly frames the scene with wide shots of the park. Yet Antonioni regularly changes our angle, at once to show the photographer hiding behind a fence, and then a tree, and then again from the photographer’s perspective, as if the director’s camera and Thomas’s converge. The director is quick to remind us of the cinema’s artifice: as soon as we are in Thomas’s camera, we are quickly positioned above Thomas, watching him skirt and strike, hunting the couple with his weapon. Of course it is also perverse and peculiar: Thomas wears bright white pants, and though he may be slim he is hardly concealed. Only when the couple (the Girl and the Man) recognizes they are being spied upon does the viewer take up a different subjective position. Here we inhabit the Girl as she approaches and shouts: “Stop it! Stop it! Give me those pictures. You can’t photograph people like that.” 4 Antonioni’s coupling of mechanical means of seeing (the photographer and director’s eyes behind their respective cameras’ lenses) with an incidental perception of crime embeds the scene within the discourse of photography as evidence that was born at the medium’s birth. One may look, for instance, at William Henry Fox Talbot’s 1844 album, The Pencil of Nature, which

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paired Talbot’s experiments in his new medium (the Talbotype) with textual exegesis. As he wrote beside an image of a collection of fine china, From the specimen here given it is sufficiently manifest, that the whole cabinet of a Virtuoso and collector of old China might be depicted on paper in little more time than it would take him to make a written inventory describing it in the usual way. The more strange and fantastic the forms of his old teapots, the more advantage in having their pictures given instead of their descriptions. And should a thief afterwards purloin the treasures—if the mute testimony of the picture were to be produced against him in court—it would certainly be evidence of a novel kind; but what the judge and jury might say to it, is a matter which I leave to speculation of those who possess legal acumen. 5

Unsure of the admissibility of a photograph as evidence, Talbot acknowledged the complicity of a photographic naturalism with the desire for truth. His lengthy caption, however, reveals that visual testimony relies upon external exposition, in this case his own text. Talbot was not alone in his desire to position photography as evidence. Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” written in 1841 shortly after Poe had published three essays on photography, is the basis for modern detective fiction. 6 Poe’s story introduces Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin who, along with a single unnamed narrator, inquires upon the “Extraordinary Murders” reported in a Paris newspaper. Though the term “detective” does not appear in Poe’s story, Dupin’s arrival to the crime scene introduces a “peculiar analytic capacity” for crime detection. 7 Dupin is able to resolve a crime, which had been seen as insoluble “in the eyes of the police.” 8 What is peculiar about the detective’s analytic capacity is the nature of Dupin’s sight. Through his meticulous, perceptive gaze, he is able to transform the “odd disorder of the chamber” where the murders occurred into “material testimony.” 9 Yet Dupin is neither an eyewitness, nor a newspaper reporter, nor a police officer, and his optical perception signals an embodied vision that trumps these other subjectivities. Written in the shadow of Poe’s own work on photography, and driven by the 1839 announcement of the invention of the Daguerreotype in Paris (where both Poe’s story is set, and where he temporarily resided), Poe’s Dupin has an analytic gaze that serves as a textual description of photographic vision. Dupin’s minute attention, refined comprehension, and intuitive “essence of a method” echo Poe’s original conception of photography, in his essay “The Daguerreotype,” as “infinitely more accurate in its representation than any painting by human hands. . . . The variations of shade, and the gradations of both linear and aerial perspective are those of truth itself in the supremeness of its perfection.” 10 Thus, when through his meticulous, perceptive gaze, Dupin is able to transform the “odd disorder of the chamber” where the murders occurred into

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“material testimony,” 11 that chambre noire (the French translation of camera obscura) is the prototype for a camera-vision. Antonioni’s Blow-Up discloses that the cinematic and photographic camera’s “minuteness of attention” (to borrow from Poe’s Dupin) corroborate reality in distinct ways. In the climactic scene of the film, wherein Thomas prints a number of photographs taken in the park of the suspect couple, only to continually view and then enlarge several of the photographs, the photographer works in an intuitive manner. As Thomas prints photographs and pins them to the interior of his studio space, across several walls, Antonioni’s camera carefully navigates the space. Replicating the shifting points of view in the park scene, here the audience is at once seeing Thomas as he gazes at the photographs he has printed (all black and white), and then we are Thomas’s gaze, panning between multiple photographs. With each successive pan we zoom closer; the photograph fills the screen. The initial pair of photographs produces wide views of the park, inspiring Thomas to print more from his negatives. The first two photographs then become a sequence of three. Thomas suspects the Girl, who in his third print (a close-up), has been caught looking past the park’s fence and into the overgrown underbrush at the edge of the picture’s frame. A magnifying glass aids Thomas’s focus—giving him a part of the frame to enlarge even further. A grainy and uncertain image of the park fence holding back the underbrush is produced. It is pinned to a wall perpendicular to the wall holding Thomas’ first three photographs. The result is that the third picture, of the Girl gazing outward, is positioned so that she appears to be looking at the unclear image of the underbrush. Antonioni’s camera pans and zooms, back and forth, across these two photographs. Thomas produces four more prints, three of which get mounted beside the image of the fence and underbrush, and a fourth (solely of the Man) is on a third perpendicular wall. Three of these photographs focus on the Girl, who peers toward Thomas with a guarded expression, or (as is the case in the first) running toward Thomas as she yelled “Stop it!” The Man, in the last two of these most recent images, is captured looking not toward Thomas but across his nervous companion. Despite the chronological disorder of the arrangement, at this point Thomas adds up the images he has made—two wide shots of the park featuring the couple, one enlargement of the woman looking off toward the fence, the fence and underbrush, and four close-ups of the couple. Thomas then suddenly remembers the Girl had provided him with a phone number, a quick dial leads him to an operator who, apparently, informs him the number is not in service (viewers don’t hear the other end of the line). Then, gazing intently at the nearly abstract image of the fence, Thomas nearly trips over himself with the hint of an image that may serve to reveal a hidden truth. The final blow-up: a figure with a gun hidden in the underbrush at the fence. It replaces that of the Girl heading toward Thomas yelling “Stop

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it!” and is placed in the middle of the sequence of now nine photographs of the park. Following these scenes of Thomas and his darkroom process, Antonioni couples cinema and photography. The screen is filled with a sequence of still photographs—the same images Thomas produced in the studio, plus a few he has not yet printed—which as a whole collude to reveal a narrative: the Girl has brought the Man to the park in order to be killed. The assassin is hidden behind the fence, in the underbrush. The final three images of this filmic sequence are ones not initially part of the photographs Thomas had mounted inside his studio (thus the film’s audience is privy to more imagery than Thomas). The first of these final three images shows the Girl at a distance from Thomas, standing beside a tree nearly at the horizon. The second is an enlargement, and now it is clear the Girl is standing over the Man’s body, hidden behind the tree. The final photograph returns to a wide shot of the park, the Girl absent while the Man’s body remains prostrate on the ground. The still photograph montage is a masterful moment of cinema, recalling the carefully composed montages of Sergei Eisenstein or, more directly, Chris Marker’s La Jetée, a short narrative film composed almost entirely of still photographs. 12 Like Antonioni’s forbearers, a non-diegetic soundtrack accompanies the montage of still photographs: the leafy wind of the London park. In this short sequence, photography is transformative, taking the viewer back to the park in order to reorder the experience into a conspiratorial narrative. What becomes clear in the successive scene, as Thomas phones his editor (Ron) to inform him as to what he has captured, is that the photographer is not aware he has witnessed a murder. To emphasize: the photograph of the dead body is an image viewers of the film see, but which Thomas never prints. As Thomas tells Ron: “Someone’s been killed!” 13 Shortly thereafter distracted by sex with two aspiring models, he will return to the photographs, and later still to the park, to view the body. However, the photographs and film that corroborate his eyewitness account will be purloined while he is absent, stolen (Thomas assumes) by the Girl. For Thomas, the miraculous act of photography—light transformed into chemistry—leads him to question his perceptions if not his life. Roland Barthes acutely summarized the sensation of viewing a photograph in just such a manner in Camera Lucida. Viewing a photograph of his mother as a child, the so-called “Winter Garden Photograph,” which depicts a moment in time that Barthes himself could not have experienced, the author states: This distortion between certainty and oblivion gave me a kind of vertigo, something of a “detective” anguish (the theme of Blow-Up was not far off); I went to the photographer’s show as to a police investigation, to learn at last what I no longer know about myself . . . language is, by nature, fictional; the

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Chris Balaschak attempt to render language unfictional requires an enormous apparatus of measurements: we convoke logic, or, lacking that, sworn oath; but the Photograph is indifferent to all intermediaries: it does not invent. . . . Photography never lies: or rather, it can lie as to the meaning of the thing; being by nature tendentious, never as to its existence. 14

For Thomas it is perhaps not anguish that is felt, but anxiety. He is uncertain as to what has been produced. Yet, the apparent proof of a park tryst staged for a murder plot is not the subject of a single photograph (as Barthes is at pains to remind us). In his 1970 essay, “The Third Meaning: Research Notes on Some Eisenstein Stills,” Barthes explained that the connections made between photographs in a sequence are indeed tendentious—willed upon the images—and not necessarily explicit in a single photograph. As Barthes explains in reviewing still photographs from a sequence (the stills are from Sergei Eisenstein’s 1944 Ivan the Terrible), there are three levels of meaning apparent. The “informational level” is that which is communicated directly by what is captured within the frame of the film still. 15 The “symbolic level” is meaning produced by “referential symbolism” in the film still. 16 However, in the film stills there lies “a third meaning—evident, erratic, obstinate.” 17 While the informational and symbolic levels of meaning are seen as “intentional” and “obvious,” the third meaning is an “obtuse meaning”; “it is on the side of carnival,” Barthes writes. 18 Barthes’s third meaning is an aspect of film’s materiality, and lies in the coupling of still frames against one another in order to produce a meaning that is specific to the pair, group, or sequence. “The filmic,” Barthes dubs this structure, which, he continues, is “the third meaning—theoretically locatable but not describable—[and] can now be seen as the passage from language to significance.” 19 The filmic arises from a “diegetic horizon,” 20 which lies in any photograph positioned within a sequence. It is worth restating that while Barthes is discussing the work of a filmmaker (Eisenstein), the articulation of meaning which he is referring to as “filmic” is related to film stills—thus a discontinuous sequence of still photographs, and not the continuous strip of cinematic film. Barthes defends his deep analysis of the stills by writing, “Perhaps it was the reading of this other text (here in stills) that SME [Sergei M. Eisenstein] called for when he said that a film is not simply to be seen and heard but to be scrutinized and listened to attentively.” 21 Barthes’s close attention to this middle ground, wherein still photographs have a diegetic horizon within a sequence and thus generate meaning collectively, only builds upon his 1961 essay, “The Photographic Message.” In “The Photographic Message,” Barthes showed that one of photography’s “connotation procedures,” that is, the ways in which it produced meaning beyond its literal, denotative image, was to be found in the syntax of se-

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quence. As he states briefly, “The concatenation,” or series of images, “offers an effect of comedy,” which he later (in “The Third Meaning”) would refer to as “obtuse.” 22 As he explains there, “The signifier of connotation is then no longer to be found at the level of any one of the fragments of the sequence.” 23 For Barthes, the filmic is a connotation not only apparent in film stills, but in other forms of serial visual culture. As he footnotes in “The Third Meaning,” “There are other ‘arts’ which combine still (or at least drawing) and story, diegesis—namely the photo-novel and the comicstrip.” 24 For Antonioni, Blow-Up is the platform for revealing the filmic meaning of photography and, as a meta-text, its potential for generating connotations that lie in a “palimpsest” (Barthes’s term) over the signification apparent in any individual photograph within a sequence or series. The filmic, for Thomas, leads to a question of perception. When the protagonist returns to the park, the morning following visiting the Man’s corpse, he discovers the body is gone. In crisis, he proceeds to watch a tennis match played by mimes. Their silence is elusive, and in the closing moments of the film, Thomas begins to “hear” the sounds of the tennis match: ball on court, and ball on racquet. The “diegetic horizon” of his photographs, which in sequence produced a conspiratorial narrative, a plot for murder, may have been an illusion. The critical scene in Blow-Up’s narrative, the sequencing of the park photographs as described above, is but one of several ways of producing photographic meaning that Antonioni explores in the film. Like Barthes, who was working contemporaneously to the filmmaker, 25 Antonioni sets Thomas in a world in which he must navigate several different ways of producing photographic meaning, each of which have specific precedents and uses in mid-twentieth-century practices. For instance, Thomas’s sequence of images in the studio, which collectively construct a murder-plot narrative, was timely not only in its relation to Barthes’s theories, but also to the explorations of photography occurring in conceptual art at the time. In the realm of conceptualism, there are two artists whose work is most relevant to Blow-Up. One is Ed Ruscha, who from 1962 through the 1970s produced eighteen self-published photo-books that were wholly reliant on casual, and often obtuse, relationships between the photographs they contained. His first, for instance, 1962’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations, contained images of twenty-six gasoline stations, accompanied by captions that gave each station’s corporate name and geographic location. 26 The work was deadpan, dumbed down, and almost purely informational. The connection between images was left to the reader and, when the reader was astute and careful (as Dave Hickey was in his essay on the book), 27 one might discover the photographs led the reader from Los Angeles to Oklahoma, or from Ruscha’s current home to the place he was born. For Matilde Nardelli, who

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has made connections as well between Ruscha and Antonioni, the point here is that Blow-Up “speaks of the reality of photography in the 1960s.” 28 As she explains further along, “if, by the 1960s, seriality and sequentiality had become thoroughly ordinary photographic forms, this was also . . . due in great part to their expanding circulation via print media, as the actual multiplication of series’ themselves across many copies granted them visibility.” 29 Ruscha’s work was an aesthetic exploration of just this condition: the structure of photographic meaning as coupled with its incessant use and dissemination as information. There are more pertinent examples for Antonioni’s Thomas than only Ruscha. Douglas Heubler’s Duration Piece #5, New York, April, 1969, was a photographic work based upon a set of instructions executed by the artist. The instructions read: During a ten minute period of time on March 17, 1969 ten photographs were made, each documenting the location in Central Park where an individually distinguishable bird call was heard. Each photograph was made with the camera pointed in the direction of the sound. That direction was then walked toward by the auditor until the instant that the next call was heard, at which time the next photograph was made and the next direction taken. The ten photographs join with this statement to constitute the form of this piece. 30

Huebler’s accompanying ten black-and-white photographs of an empty park at the very end of winter disclose little information. Most importantly there are no birds apparent and, of course, the photographs reveal no birdsong. The relation to Antonioni is striking: a series of photographs of a park for which a meaning is produced externally, rather than being apparent at the informational level of any individual photograph. Huebler’s process-based work should also remind us of how Antonioni’s Thomas, who is by profession a fashion photographer, is defined by the snapping of his shutter. An early, and much celebrated scene in the film, features Thomas, camera in hand, ordering around models while he (somewhat acrobatically) takes countless photographs. Assistants busy themselves with reloading and delivering successively different cameras (some are medium format, others the more standard 35mm SLR). The apex of the scene involves Thomas, mounting a model lying on her back (Veruschka), photographing her from above, and seeming to climax on both a sexual and aesthetic level. The purpose of the scene establishes not only Thomas’s chauvinism, but also his process: create many photographic negatives, and reconcile the most productive and effective of those images in the darkroom at some later date. Beyond playing the prototypical London fashion photographer, and exploiting photography’s ability to furnish visual evidence, Thomas aspires to more compassionate photographic work. After Thomas has photographed in

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the park, but before he prints the photographs and makes his discovery, he meets with his editor and agent, Ron. In a restaurant and over lunch, the two discuss a photo-book project. It is indeed this project which opens the film: Thomas emerging from an overnight shift of manual laborers in an undisclosed area of London. The scene sets the historical backdrop. This is not only the swinging 1960s of London, but also the very frail end of the city’s deindustrialization. Thomas navigates both these worlds. Ron reviews the work, which are in fact photographs commissioned by Antonioni from Don McCullin, a successful social documentary photographer working on the deindustrialized communities of England at the time. As Anna Hanreich has written, the photographs are from McCullin’s “East of Aldgate” series that was published in the magazine Man About Town in February of 1961. 31 If Thomas the fashion photographer produces work in an aleatory manner, from which single fashion shots will be exploited later, and Thomas the detective furnishes evidence through discontinuous sequences of events, Thomas the social documentarian seeks didactic, informative, and compelling portraits of disenfranchised communities. While we may view Thomas as an archetypal photographer engaging photography’s diverse uses in the 1960s, as many have, 32 to make these stylistic and aesthetic connections is also to overlook that many of the issues Antonioni brings to the fore about photography: its processes in generating meaning, its use as a means to detecting social and moral complexities, each of which show the film’s profound interpenetration with the politicization of photography at the time. In particular, there are a number of events during the early 1960s, extending from Cold War London to the Kennedy administration, which speak to the ways in which photography’s use as evidence had reached an apogee, while also exposing different means by which photography could produce evidence. There is a striking similarity between the mysterious murder in Blow-Up, and the swinging London backdrop it presents, and the Profumo scandal that ravaged British politics only a few years prior. The affair centered on a relationship the British secretary of war, John Profumo, had with a call girl, Christine Keeler. While the relationship took place in 1961, Keeler was simultaneously having an affair with a Soviet naval officer in London, Yevgeny Ivanov. Though the love-triangle’s public exposure in 1963 and investigation found no breaches of national security, as authors Anthony Summers and Stephen Dorril subsequently outlined in their work on the subject, secrets surrounding the relationship between the Soviet Union and Cuba were potentially in flux. 33 Furthermore, an initial investigation by the FBI looked into President Kennedy’s possible involvement with Keeler while on a state visit to London in 1961. 34 What these affairs and investigations produced was a sense of suspicion around the apparently clean public images of the politicians involved. As outlined in Daniel Boorstin’s 1961 book, The Image: A

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Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, the mediation of politics had, by 1960, increasingly produced a situation wherein political remarks and figures were never candid and always scripted. 35 Kennedy’s public image was indicative of Boorstin’s paradigm shift. Garry Winogrand’s 1960 photograph of Kennedy at the 1960 Democratic National Convention, which pictures the candidate during a speech, from behind, while capturing Kennedy’s face on a TV screen in the shot as well, speaks to the value of the mediated image over the personal. In 1963, Lewis Morley, a photographer known to work between fields of fashion, journalism, and social documentary, photographed Christine Keeler. From their session, a now infamous photograph shows a fully nude Keeler sitting backwards on an iconic mid-century Arne Jacobsen chair. That Keeler, in this portrait at least, has the same hairstyle and general appearance as Antonioni’s Girl (Vanessa Redgrave) is striking. That the Girl is deeply entwined in an affair and murderous plot involving a slightly older Suit (the Man) only reinforces Antonioni’s insinuating the political sex scandal of only a few years prior. Furthermore, Morley’s working process, as he told the Victoria and Albert Museum, was not unlike Antonioni’s Thomas: During the session, three rolls of 120 film were shot. . . . Looking at the contact sheet, one can see that this image is smaller than the rest because I had stepped back. It was this pose that became the first published and most used image. The nude session had taken less than five minutes to complete. It wasn’t until I developed the film that I discovered that somehow I had misfired one shot and there were only eleven images on a twelve-exposure film. How this came about is a mystery to me. 36

The collusion of publicity and fashion photography were but one way in which the worlds of photography were proliferating in the Cold War period. During Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs crisis, it would be low-level reconnaissance photography of military sites in Cuba that ultimately provided evidence to the president, and the broader world, that a proxy war between the United States and the Soviet Union was unfolding. Initial images, taken by U-2 spy planes were seen as “blurry” and “difficult for nonexperts to interpret.” 37 Only images taken in October of 1963 “produced the most useful photographs, six-by-six inch negatives that combined panoramic views of the countryside and details of missile launchers, trucks, and even individual soldiers.” 38 Even such high-resolution photographs were not evidence, but relied upon a team of “photo interpreters.” As apparent in the resulting photographs, photographic intelligence (or “Photint”) consisted not of photographs themselves, but photographs supplemented by overdrawn texts, lines, and icons, interpreting the images for the broader intelligence community. Such photographs were shown, and interpreted publically at the United Nations by Adlai Stevenson to the Security Council on October 25, 1963. 39 Not

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unlike the photographs in Blow-Up it is important to underscore that the value of the images as evidence, and the consequences of their value as such, lay not in the denotative aspects, but rather the captioning, highlighting, and drawing upon the surfaces of the photographs themselves. Lastly, we might look to images from the “Zapruder” film of Kennedy’s assassination, reproduced in Life magazine, as attending to the filmic aspects of sequential photography. For the uninitiated, the film in question was shot by Abraham Zapruder and captured the traumatic moment of Kennedy’s assassination in a motorcade in Dallas on November 22, 1963. For the November 29, 1963, issue, the editors of Life magazine reproduced thirty frames of the film in their pages. Those images provided graphic and damning testimony as to the brutality of the assassination. The images’ appearance also spoke to a public desire for visual evidence. Of course the resulting photographs narrowly testify to the moment of Kennedy’s death, while the time between individual frames remains impossible to recover, while furthermore the images themselves speak little to the circumstances of how or why this tragedy occurred. Within the political context of photographs appearing in the media as irrefutable proof, and as grounds for war, sanctions, trauma, or even narcissism, Antonioni’s deep engagement with the processes and structure behind photography and its meanings strikes one as cynical. Blow-Up is a tale of disillusionment, a sentiment emphasized by a remarkable scene. One of the few moments in the film involving media other than photography, is when Thomas stumbles into the back door of a rock club only to witness the Yardbirds perform. The band’s audience is a silent, unmoving group of fashionable teens. They have no reaction, and show no emotion, despite the sweaty, impassioned, and (relative to its time) aggressive rock-n-roll they witness. A guitarist, Jeff Beck, becomes frustrated with a malfunctioning amplifier and proceeds to destroy his guitar on stage. When he throws the guitar’s broken neck to the crowd, the fans erupt in a passionate fight for the symbol of their fandom. Thomas walks away the victor in this struggle, but once outside throws the guitar neck to the ground, from where it is then ignored by the street’s many pedestrians. Though Thomas has photographically uncovered a murder plot, he ends the film in a state of doubt about photography’s ability to convey truth. Blow-Up exposes that Cold War-era photography would be defined not by a naïve sense of the medium’s compelling veracity (which had so enlightened its early commentators), but by doubt, and an ability to see photographic meaning as always conditioned by its context.

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REFERENCES Alberro, Alexander, and Patricia Norvell, eds. Recording Conceptual Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Antonioni, Michelangelo, and Julio Coirtázar, Blow-Up, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni (Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Entertainment, 1966), motion picture. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. ———. “Cher Antonioni.” Cahiers du cinéma 311 (May 1980): 9–11. ———. “The Photographic Message.” In Image, Music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath, 15–31. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. ———. “The Third Meaning: Research Notes on Some Eisenstein Stills.” In Image, Music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath, 52–68. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. Boorstin, Daniel. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. New York: Vintage Books, 1992. Dobbs, Michael. One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008. Hanreich, Anna. “‘The East End is Dirty and Ugly’: Photojournalism in England in the Sixties.” In Blow-Up: Antonioni’s Classic Film and Photography, edited by Walter Moser and Klaus Albrecht Schröder, 134–39. Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2014. Haworth-Booth, Mark. “A Camera Eye as Rare as a Pink Zebra.” In Police Photographs: The Picture as Evidence, edited by Sandra S. Phillips, 33–39. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1997. ———. “A Connoisseur of the Art of Photography in the 1850s: The Rev. C. H. Townshend.” In Perspectives on Photography: Essays in Honor of Beaumont Newhall, edited by Peter Walch and Thomas Barrow, 9–31. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986. ———. “The Dawning of an Age: Chauncey Hare Townshend, Eyewitness.” In The Golden Age of British Photography, 1839–1900. New York: Aperture, 1984. ———. The Golden Age of British Photography, 1839–1900. New York: Aperture, 1984. Hickey, Dave. “Edward Ruscha: Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 1962.” Artforum 35, no. 5 (January, 1997): 61–62. Knightly, Phillip, and Caroline Kennedy. An Affair of the State: The Profumo Case and the Framing of Stephen Ward. London: Jonathan Cape, 1987. Mahler, Astrid. “Fashion Photographers Here Below to the Moment: British Fashion Photography of the Nineteen-Sixties as Reflected by Blow-Up.” In Blow-Up: Antonioni’s Classic Film and Photography, edited by Walter Moser and Klaus Albrecht Schröder, 60–65. Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2014. Marker, Chris. La Jetée, directed by Chris Marker (Paris, France: Argos Films, 1962), motion picture. Moser, Walter, and Klaus Albrecht Schröder, eds. Blow-Up: Antonioni’s Classic Film and Photography. Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2014. Nardelli, Matilde. “Blow-Up and the Plurality of Photography.” In Antonioni: Centenary Essays, edited by Laura Rascaroli and John David Rhodes, 185–205. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011. Phillips, Sandra, ed. Police Photographs: The Picture as Evidence. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1997. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Daguerreotype.” In Classic Essays on Photography, edited by Alan Trachtenberg, 37–38. Stony Creek, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980. ———. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” In Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Tales and Sketches, 1831–1842, 527–74. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1978. Rascaroli, Laura. “Modernity, Put into Form: Blow-Up, Objectuality, 1960s Antonioni.” In Antonioni: Centenary Essays, edited by Laura Rascaroli and John David Rhodes, 64–81. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011. Rascaroli, Laura, and John David Rhodes. Antonioni: Centenary Essays. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011. Ruscha, Edward. Twentysix Gasoline Stations. Los Angeles: National Excelsior Press, 1962.

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Sekula, Allan. “The Body and the Archive.” October 39 (Winter, 1986): 3–64. Sobieszek, Robert. Ghost in the Shell: Photography and the Human Soul, 1850–2000. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999. Summers, Anthony, and Stephen Dorril. The Secret Worlds of Stephen Ward: Sex, Scandal, and Deadly Secrets in the Profumo Affair. New York: Open Toad Integrated Media, 2013. Talbot, William Henry Fox. The Pencil of Nature. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1844. Trachtenberg, Allan, ed. Classic Essays on Photography. Stony Creek, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980. Victoria and Albert Museum. “Christine Keeler Photograph: A Modern Icon.” http:// www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/c/christine-keeler-photograph-a-modern-icon/.

NOTES 1. Antonioni and Coirtázar, Blow-Up. 2. Barthes, “The Third Meaning,” 54–65. 3. Antonioni and Coirtázar, Blow-Up, 37:45. 4. Ibid., 29:54. 5. Talbot, The Pencil of Nature, unpaginated. 6. Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” In photography historian Mark HaworthBooth’s “A Camera Eye as Rare as a Pink Zebra,” he notes that Poe’s story is the source of the detective “as a character in fiction” (33). Haworth-Booth’s essay is one of the rare instances of scholarship speaking to a relation between the photographer and the detective. Other sources for material correlating the detective and the photographer are Haworth-Booth’s “The Dawning of an Age” and “A Connoisseur of the Art of Photography in the 1850s.” Related material on the themes of police, and policing can be found in Sekula, “The Body and the Archive” and Sobieszek, Ghost in the Shell. 7. Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” 318. 8. Ibid., 328. 9. Ibid., 334, 322. 10. Poe, “The Daguerreotype,” 38. 11. Poe., “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” 334, 322. 12. Marker, La Jetée. 13. Antonioni and Coirtázar, Blow-Up, 1:39:57. 14. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 85–87. 15. Barthes, “The Third Meaning,” 52. 16. Ibid., 52. 17. Ibid., 53. 18. Ibid., 54–55. 19. Ibid., 65. 20. Ibid., 66. 21. Ibid., 68. 22. Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” 24, 25. 23. Ibid., 24. 24. Barthes, “The Third Meaning,” 66. 25. The only documented interaction between Barthes and Antonioni is Barthes’s letter, “Cher Antonioni.” published in Cahiers du cinéma. Antonioni’s brief response, published alongside Barthes’s letter in the journal’s homage to Barthes, who had died in March 1980, included thanking the writer for Camera Lucida. 26. Ruscha, Twentysix Gasoline Stations. 27. Hickey, “Edward Ruscha,” 61–62. 28. Nardelli, “Blow-Up and the Plurality of Photography,” 185. 29. Ibid., 197. 30. An image of Huebler’s piece is reproduced in full within the unpaginated illustrations of Alberro and Norvell’s Recording Conceptual Art.

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31. Hanreich, “The East End is Dirty and Ugly,” 134. 32. See Rascaroli, “Modernity, Put Into Form,” and Nardelli, “Blow-Up and the Plurality of Photography.” Also important here is Mahler’s “Fashion Photographers Here Below to the Moment.” 33. Summers and Dorril, The Secret Worlds of Stephen Ward, originally published as Honeytrap in 1987. 34. These connections are explored in Knightly and Kennedy, An Affair of the State. 35. Boorstin, The Image. 36. Victoria and Albert Museum, “Christine Keeler Photograph: A Modern Icon,” para. 8. 37. Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight, 63. 38. Ibid. 39. Readers may recall Colin Powell’s speech to the United Nations on February 5, 2003, as relying on similar photographic intelligence to make a case for the US war with Iraq.

Chapter Eleven

Light and the Truth in Painting Thinking Blumenberg’s Absolute Metaphor of Light through Cézanne Francis Halsall

Cézanne once stated, “I owe you the truth in painting and I shall give it to you,” a claim echoed in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s later observation that, “In paintings themselves we could seek a figured philosophy of vision—its iconography, perhaps.” 1 This chapter builds upon these ideas by making two key claims. First, it claims that metaphysical truths, which are often assumed and un-interrogated, are underwritten by a realm of non-conceptual experience. Second, it claims that aesthetic practices can be used to think through this non-conceptual realm of what German philosopher and historian Hans Blumenberg calls absolute metaphors. By this, Blumenberg means the nonconceptual, but necessary, basis for experience and thought. My argument is that Cézanne’s paintings are a visual form of such an absolute metaphor and, as such, allow us to reflect upon the conditions of experience. In this I also draw on French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s view of painting as having philosophical significance. Underpinning this is the assumption that there is a use for aesthetics in metaphysics; that an aesthetics as first philosophy is possible. This entails defending aesthetics as a sphere of validity that is not subordinate to either scientific or judicial/ethical claims. I begin with the significance of aesthetic practices in both Blumenberg’s and Merleau-Ponty’s thought. I then introduce Blumenberg, his concept of absolute metaphor, and in particular the absolute metaphor of light as a metaphor for truth. Blumenberg claims that how light is understood reveals a history of metaphysics predicated on a dualistic conception of the world 181

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divided into what can be seen and hence known, and what is hidden. However, this dualism is often hidden from plain view as it has become sedimented into everyday thought. Then, drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s accounts of Cézanne, I discuss how art can reveal how our world is shaped according to these absolute/foundational metaphors. In short, Cézanne has to treat the world (its light, its shapes, its textures) according to the conditions of his medium (paint). Hence he must render the experience of it abstract in order to paint it. Cézanne treats light as paint. In doing so he offers an opportunity to reflect on the nature of lived experience. In conclusion I argue that in this treatment of light as paint, Cézanne offers a way to think about a fundamental condition of experience through aesthetic reflection. THE PHILOSOPHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF ART Both Blumenberg and Merleau-Ponty recognized the philosophical importance of aesthetic practices. For Blumenberg myth and its manifestations in culture is a means of managing human finitude and contingency through establishing pattern and making meaning. This begins in myth and metaphor but has subsequently migrated into art such that “our situation is characterised by the ‘transference’ of the operation formerly deposited in metaphors to art—the latter taken to persist in unhistorical and unmediated productivity— whereby the urgency of those questions proves to be ungainsayable.” 2 Hence through culture certain conditions of existence and thought can be traced through a science of metaphors, or metaphorology. Merleau-Ponty sees a more active role for (modernist) art. Rather than serve as a passive analogue for consciousness, it could become an active philosophical tool for phenomenological inquiry. For Blumenberg, art, like myth and metaphor, is underwritten by a tacit metaphysics. Take, for example, the “imitation of nature” in art. Art can only ever imitate nature and never be it or its equivalent. This is because whilst art mimics the appearances of the world and reproduces some of its phenomenal effects and structure, nature is, ultimately, un-representable in its totality. Hence, in the antithetical accounts of art in the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions a dichotomy is established between humanity and its products (technology, poetics, and rhetoric), and nature. Human creativity is a historical process immersed in a “growing incongruity between Being and nature and through it the growing relevance of the space of originary creativity.” 3 Therefore by interrogating the conditions of this process through cultural products such as works of mythology and also, crucially, art, we can reflect upon the metaphysical assumptions informing their production. Further, these assumptions are unavoidable because “so powerful is the foundational formula of imitation of nature, so deeply rooted in the metaphysical tradition,

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that its sanction for the significance of human creations cannot be dispensed with.” 4 Likewise, Merleau-Ponty consistently refers to art as a foil for phenomenological reflection. Art, he argues, allows another perspective on the world, perhaps as a companion method to phenomenological bracketing or epoché. Of Cézanne, for example, he claims: We live in the midst of man-made objects, among tools, in houses, streets, cities, and most of the time we see them only through the human actions which put them to use. We become used to thinking that all of this exists necessarily and unshakeably. Cézanne’s painting suspends these habits of thought and reveals the base of inhuman nature upon which man has installed himself. 5

As Martin Jay observes, for Merleau-Ponty, “the great artist does not negate perception; he or she renews it by returning us to that primordial experience before the split between imagination and sensation, expression and imitation.” 6 In his later work Merleau-Ponty refers to art as non-philosophy. 7 However, this is not to negate its important in relation to philosophy, but rather to “interlace” the two practices in a dialectical and mutually supporting relationship with each other and questions concerning “truth.” As Galen Johnson observes, this “figured philosophy” is a means by which epistemological and ontological questions might be given a nonlinguistic, oblique or aesthetic form in works of art. Such “figuring,” Johnson argues, involves using language that is literary, indirect, allusive and metaphorical; hence, drawing an epistemological equivalence between metaphorics and philosophy; its content is “interlaced” with art, meaning definite distinctions between philosophy and non-philosophy become hard to identify. 8 Further, like Blumenberg, Merleau-Ponty proposes a form of truth that aesthetic practices can reveal. Of modern painters, he claims, “They want nothing to do with a truth defined as the resemblance of painting and the world. They would accept the idea of truth defined as a painting’s cohesion with itself.” 9 He further claims, “Modern painting, like modern thought generally, obliges us to admit a truth which does not resemble things, which is without any external model and without any predestined instruments of expression, and which is nevertheless truth.” 10 This is not a correspondence theory of truth in which the truth of a statement is conceived of in terms of a correspondence with the “way things really are” (that is, that truth is a relational property). Merleau-Ponty does not theorize truth in terms of a representational theory of the mind. As Johnson says, Merleau-Ponty opposes “the entire philosophical tradition’s efforts to speak of mind and truth on a representational model of reality” such as is found in the Cartesian tradition. 11 Crucially for my argument, this is the same

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tradition that Blumenberg critiques. Truth, instead, is that which is revealed, unconcealed, made visible and brought-to-light. HANS BLUMENBERG Blumenberg’s central concern is how humans, throughout their history, have dealt with their finitude. They do so through the creation of structures which manage contingency and simplify chaos such as myth, culture, science, and metaphor. Subsequently, Blumenberg’s work can be a vertiginous journey through the history of Western civilization, including references to Copernicus and Vico alongside Joyce, Goethe, and Hitchcock. His thought was inevitably shaped by the context of Germany after World War II. This had profound consequences for his own conception of the connection between truth and the public sphere. In this respect his work can be considered both in relation to Jürgen Habermas’s exhaustive attempts to negotiate claims to validity and the legacy of Heidegger’s hermeneutic refocusing of the phenomenological project onto questions of ontology. Like Heidegger, Blumenberg engaged in a critique of Husserl. His post-doctoral habilitation (1950) interrogated the supposed crisis of phenomenology under the theme of ontological distance. Also like Heidegger, he offered an account of the history of western metaphysics, but in the spirit of an archaeology, rather than calling for its Destruktion. Consequently, his overall project of a “phenomenological anthropology” shares much of the spirit and assumptions of Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms in that it is concerned with the origin of human meaning and truth. 12 Considered in the light of this, Blumenberg falls on Cassirer’s side of the notorious 1929 Davos Debate between Cassirer and Heidegger, which is commonly seen as opening up a rift in German philosophy in their different responses to the question, what is it to be a human being? This pitched Cassirer’s attempts to revive the neoKantian faith in the universality of human reason against the Heideggerean account of human finitude and, as Peter Eli Gordon puts it in his commentary on the debate, “the essential dependency of the human being on what is disclosed within experience.” 13 As David Adams observes, Blumenberg’s signal claim that “meaning is no constant in history” 14 can be read as a critical commentary on Heidegger’s infamous Rector’s speech in Freiberg in 1933, where he claimed that “man, as a finite being, has a certain infinitude in the ontological.” 15 This commentary came from the perspective of an attempt to reconstruct philosophical anthropology after the apparent waning of neo-Kantianism, but in a manner that also recognizes the importance of Heidegger’s interrogation of being and the finitude of Dasein. As Anselm Haverkamp observes, “It was Blumenberg rather than Habermas . . . who in a most remarkable role reversal, followed

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Walter Benjamin and Theodore W. Adorno in the construction of a critical, post-Kantian theory of the aesthetic . . . [and] embodied a characteristic divide in German postwar philosophy, that between phenomenology and sociology or . . . between aesthetic and social theory.” 16 Blumenberg’s project can in part, then, be seen as an attempt to work across this gap in German postwar philosophy and produce a phenomenological and sociological history of ideas, as well a social and an aesthetic theory. In doing so he offered an alternative to the two dominant accounts of modernity. The first was the view of claim of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Karl Löwith 17 that modern values are “secularized theological concepts.” 18 More specifically, they saw religious values as having migrated into the structures of the modern public sphere. Yet, Blumenberg countered by saying, “[Modernity] should be described not as the transposition of authentically theological contents into secularized alienation from their origin but rather as the reoccupation of answer positions that had become vacant and whose corresponding questions could not be eliminated.” 19 According to the second dominant account, cast the history of modernity as part of a teleological move from faith to reason; from Mythos to Logos, which Blumenberg warned was “a dangerous misconstruction.” 20 METAPHOROLOGY AND MYTH The (tacit) manifesto for Blumenberg’s philosophical project appeared early in his Paradigms for a Metaphorology. At its core, metaphorology “seeks to burrow down to the substructure of thought, the underground, the nutrient solution of systemic crystallizations.” 21 Absolute metaphors make concept formation possible, being prior to it. For Blumenberg, metaphysics is ultimately a product of history; the one inheres within the other. This entails a systematic history of ideas that brings to the surface and then interrogates the concepts that are used to understand the world. These concepts can be shown to be underwritten—and hence made meaningful—by a realm of non-conceptuality, which, though discussed tangentially in a late essay, remained arguably the most important leitmotif throughout all his work. 22 The claim in that essay is that access to the realm of non-conceptuality is gained through myth and metaphor. Myth and metaphor are the symbolic forms that make thought possible; they are enabling structures for consciousness. From this starting point, Blumenberg produced works of staggering erudition that unpacked the foundations of knowledge in Western modernity. These included The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, which can be read as a lengthy riposte to claims that the modern state emerged from “secularized theological concepts”; The Genesis of the Copernican World, which looked

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at the consequences of the Copernican revolution on thought and experience; and Work on Myth, which explored the continuity of mythical tropes in modern thinking. The last of these works, Work on Myth, continues the basic claims made of Metaphorology but develops them into a thorough account of the central importance of mythical structures in human consciousness. Myth is presented as a form of pattern making through which humans can deal with the radical contingency of existence when faced by the absolutism of reality. So humans, when faced with their finitude and an indifferent and seemingly infinite world, cope through the construction of some form of order within it. This begins primarily as myth and then religion in which geneses are first posited in the guise of origin myths. This then develops into activities that provide structure such as science and technology; and, more significantly for the argument here, art, literature, and so on. Hence poetry in the broadest sense of the term as poesis is a means of self-assertion from humans who find themselves initially helpless when confronted by nature. This shares some common ground with Heidegger’s account of human finitude in that it recognizes the inability of humans to grasp the totality of being. The difference being that in grounding this in an account of myth, Blumenberg recognized an anthropological archaeology of key concepts. In doing so he effectively proposed an evolutionary model of human consciousness in place of a teleological one: “Culture, then, is regulated by ‘a piece of Darwinism in the realm of words.’ It is a process of the kind that produces institutions and rituals having a durability that is incomprehensible in retrospect.” 23 This has three key implications. First, the basis of the modern lifeworld of shared meanings, practices, institutions and values lies in a primordial emergence of humanity and the role of mythology in this birth into attempts to deal with vulnerability. The development of consciousness is not, therefore, a move from mythos to logos; from superstition to reason—because we can never leave the vestiges of myth behind. Myth as a primal impulse for managing contingency remains integral to consciousness, whatever form it is historically predetermined to take. Second, myth already contains a submerged metaphysics that establishes a dichotomy between culture and nature; between thought and the world underwritten by the transcendence of consciousness for a world that it is already separated from. Third, culture is not entertainment or luxury. It is not inessential but necessary because an unmediated engagement with reality is never possible. The remnants of myth still present in thought are evident in metaphor; hence the task of a metaphorology to reveal these conditions. Metaphors are structures of thought yet which remain hidden from thinking directly; that is, they are a means by which the world can be present to consciousness. Metaphors are “leftover elements, rudiments on the path from mythos to logos; as such, they indicate the Cartesian provisionality of the historical situation in

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which philosophy finds itself at any given time, measured against the regulative ideality of pure logos.” 24 Hence, metaphorology is the task of “unmasking and counteracting the in-authenticity of figurative speech.” 25 Blumenberg likens these absolute metaphors to fossils, “that indicate an archaic stratum of the trial of theoretical curiosity.” 26 They are buried in our lifeworld and need to be excavated and brought to the surface in order to be made visible. They are “‘translations’ that resist being converted back into authenticity and logicality.” 27 Absolute metaphors will elude conceptualization and “prove resistant to terminological claims and cannot be dissolved into conceptuality.” 28 They are, in other words, a case of nonconceptuality, which “wants more than the ‘form’ of processes or states; it wants their ‘gestalt.’” 29 And because they resist conceptuality they are also not verifiable. They are rather the underlying support and conditions of possibility (the medium perhaps) for verification itself: They therefore not only fail to say “nothing but the truth,’ they do not say anything truthful at all. Absolute metaphors “answer” the supposedly naïve, in principle unanswerable questions whose relevance lies quite simply in the fact that they cannot be brushed aside, since we do not pose them ourselves but find them already posed in the ground of our existence . . . they give structure to a world, representing the nonexperienceable, nonapprehensible totality of the real. 30

Further, it is not just that metaphors do not present the “truth”; truth itself is underwritten by the structure of metaphor. Metaphorology thus becomes the task of excavating these conditions. Absolute metaphors are a priori in that they come prior to thinking yet are hidden and sedimented within it. They are the blind-spots of discourse; those positions that we cannot fully acknowledge because they are obscured by the position from which we survey the world. This idea draws on Husserl’s identification of the “historical a priori” that underlies apodictic selfevidence. 31 In his essay “The Origin of Geometry,” Husserl refers to the “historical sense-structures” which underlie thought. Referring to these as absolute metaphors effectively captures how they operate in language and thought; that is, they refer to an absolute condition of knowing the world. The horizons of our lifeworld are structured according to non-conceptual givens. The world as it is lived is shaped by metaphor or, as Vida Pavesich says, “Metaphor is the orientating edge of intentionality.” 32 Meaning, then, is not a historical constant, but rather a relation to reality. The whole of reality, it can be said, is modulated and brought into view by metaphor. Blumenberg says, “One of the essential tasks of conceptual history (in the thus expanded sense) would be to ascertain and analyse their conceptually irredeemable expressive function.” 33 Hence, the work of metaphorology lies in revealing how “even absolute metaphors have a history.” 34 They

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are historical in a profound sense in that they refer to a subterranean domain where they remain hidden as the already determined conditions of possibility for thought. This history is the “horizons of meaning and ways of seeing within which concepts undergo their modifications.” 35 This means that absolute metaphors are far from being dead metaphors. Instead they are thoroughly alive in our experience because they give structure to appearances and make the world that we know. In these terms metaphor is required for thinking in order that otherwise abstract concepts gain a purchase in lived experience. In other words abstractions are intelligible through the operations of metaphor. Such metaphors are not mere poetic redescriptions of our place in the world, they are means by which that world can be known in direct relation to our body’s place within it. Such metaphors arise from our primal proprioceptive awareness. They are, in the words of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By. 36 Such metaphors of space and time do not merely enrich thinking; they are foundational for thought itself: we fall asleep, get up, drop dead. Such foundational metaphors have epistemological and ontological significance. They allow us, in the words of Clive Cazeaux, “to transform metaphor, normally regarded as an empirical phenomenon, into an a priori, ontological condition of experience.” 37 Hence, in a phenomenological move Blumenberg positions these foundational metaphors within systems of cultural history and pre-existent lifeworlds. In doing so he correlates concrete conditions of lived experience to abstract concepts and provides a ground for a history of ideas in phenomena. For example, Blumenberg describes how “it may have been philosophy’s first absolute metaphor when Heraclitus described thinking as fire, not only because fire, for him, was the divine element but because it has the property of constantly taking up what is foreign and transforming it into itself.” 38 The Copernican revolution is another such metaphor. It had not only scientific implications, but both cultural and metaphysical ones too. Crucially it involved not only the remodeling of the cosmos but also a shift in worldview. Copernicus overturned the cosmological metaphors of previous thinkers and the worldview underwritten by their cosmology. What emerges is a theoretical awareness, developed also by Galileo and Descartes, that fundamental features of nature can be described mathematically as a system. Hence the world, by virtue of its capacity to be modeled mathematically, is understood to be separate from human consciousness and independent of thought. As David Auerbach puts it, The Copernican revolution served as the perfect exemplar of Blumenberg’s metaphorology. It demonstrated how a change in physical conceptions of reality impacted our abstract, ideological conceptions of reality. The absolutism of reality is its non-negotiability, the fact that the world, our reality, does not

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explain itself to us. We must explain it to ourselves—conceptually, religiously, scientifically—through a fundamental use of metaphor in inexact relation to reality. 39

My final example for this section on Blumenberg is that of light as a metaphor for truth, an absolute metaphor for the subject–object dichotomy that underpins the history of Western metaphysics. In light, one finds models of truth as that which is revealed and consciousness as that which is transcendental. In “Light as a Metaphor for Truth,” Blumenberg traces the figurative and philosophical use of light in order to show the incomparable ways in which “transformations of the basic metaphor indicate changes in worldunderstanding and self-understanding.” 40 Because light produces “spaces, distance, orientation, calm contemplation,” 41 the history of how it is understood presents an opportunity to chart a history of metaphysics in which particular ideas have become sedimented and thus hidden from direct interrogation. In understandings of light one finds a means of thinking the absolute and the apparent irreconcilability of human consciousness to it. So, from Parmenides onwards, light becomes coupled with a dualistic conception of the world—a world divided into what can be seen and hence known, and that which is hidden from view. This dualism splits the world into light and darkness, truth and appearance, Being and non-being. With illumination darkness is overcome. Hence, in Plato’s cave allegory—later used explicitly by Descartes—we leave the darkness of the cave in order to enter into knowledge. But this allegory is itself underwritten by the hidden absolute metaphor of light as truth which cleaves the world according to a dualistic structure in which truth is hidden away but then discovered and revealed to consciousness. In summary, how light is understood reveals a primordial structure to consciousness. In other words, in light we find the submerged metaphysics of a transcendental subject estranged from the absolutism of reality. I will later argue that Cézanne’s paintings offer an opportunity to reflect upon these conditions. They do so by giving a visual articulation of light in such a manner that some of its conditions are brought into view. But before moving to this conclusion, I survey how Merleau-Ponty both gives a similar critique of the transcendental subject of western metaphysics and looks to aesthetic practices as a means to stage this critique. MERLEAU-PONTY One of Merleau-Ponty’s starting points for his Phenomenology of Perception is similar to Blumenberg’s; namely, a critique of western metaphysics. The two dominant trends in philosophy, empiricism and idealism, were both

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predicated, he argued, on a dualism (comparable to the one identified by Blumenberg) between subject and object. 42 Merleau-Ponty shared with Blumenberg an intellectual foundation in phenomenology informed by a reading of Husserl subsequently used to critique the history of philosophy. Both, ultimately, grounded their thought in the profound interconnections between questions of aesthetics and ontology. Blumenberg does this through his insistence on the historical and intellectual continuity between mythos and logos whilst Merleau-Ponty consistently contends that artists—in particular modern artists—were doing the work of philosophers, and that philosophical and artistic practice were often inseparable. In particular Cézanne’s paintings, for Merleau-Ponty, were the artistic equivalent to phenomenological methodology; they exemplified philosophical questions into the nature of experience and the nature of things. The equivalence between aesthetic and philosophical practices is explicit in his use of examples of art throughout his work where numerous references to Cézanne appear alongside those to modernist artists working in painting (Picasso, Braque, Klee, de Staël, Giacometti, Matisse), sculpture (Rodin, Richier), and literature and poetry (Balzac, Proust, Valéry). Blumenberg equates modernist art with contemporary philosophy, as both make contemporary questions about perception and their primary subject matter. MerleauPonty explains in more detail what is at stake in the turn to modern art in The World of Perception: In the work of Cézanne, Juan Gris, Braque and Picasso, in different ways, we encounter objects—lemons, mandolins, bunches of grapes, pouches of tobacco—that do not pass quickly before our eyes in the guise of objects we “know well” but, on the contrary, hold our gaze, ask questions of it, convey to it in a bizarre fashion the very secret of their substance, the very mode of their material existence and which, so to speak, stand “bleeding” before us. This was how painting led us back to a vision of things themselves. 43

Here, he claims that painting as a non-linguistic medium gives some insight into a primordial, pre-reflexive dimension to experience. This theme is explored in both “Cézanne’s Doubt” and “Eye and Mind” where, again, modernist painting is used to illustrate certain aspects of the phenomenological method and as an analogue for philosophical reflection. In particular it draws attention to the pre-conceptual aspect of lived experience that is prereflective consciousness and body (or “motor”) intentionality as it is discussed at length in The Phenomenology of Perception. In “Eye and Mind” painting features centrally, which Johnson observes “marks Merleau-Ponty’s return to the study of painting itself as a renewed inspiration for philosophical work, in this case for developing a new metaphysics, . . . to develop his philosophy beyond phenomenology and beyond

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structuralism toward a new post-Cartesian ontology of visibility and invisibility.” 44 Merleau-Ponty sees in painting a model for an ontology. This suggests that color, and by implication light, is not a mere accidental (in the Aristotelian sense) or secondary quality of objects which are more fundamentally stable and more fully understood in terms of substance or primary qualities. Instead color gets one closer to what Merleau-Ponty calls, quoting Paul Klee, “the heart of things” 45 “Eye and Mind” begins with a refutation of the scientific mode of thought as being sufficient by itself to describe the world and experience. As in The Phenomenology of Perception, science is identified as predicated on conceptual abstraction that does not accurately reflect experience as “science manipulates things and gives up living in them.” 46 This sets up the main argument regarding the role of art in revealing the conditions of experience: “Now art, especially painting, draws upon this fabric of brute meaning which operationalism would prefer to ignore. Art and only art does so in full innocence,” 47 thus echoing Blumenberg’s similar claim in Paradigms for a Metaphorology that his starting point is in asking fundamentally naive questions. 48 Then, Merleau-Ponty discusses how science misses the way in which the body is folded into world. That is, our body is part of the world, and our bodies are an inextricable part of our experience of it. The painter, MerleauPonty argues, shows this because they demonstrate through their own bodily actions and discipline that it is a body that paints, not a mind. Artists must manipulate their medium through their own physical actions; they must make marks and move stuff around, and they cannot do this through mere thought. He says: “The painter ‘takes his body with him’ . . . we cannot imagine how a mind could paint.” 49 Finally there is a discussion of spatial depth and the role played by (modernist) painting in more accurately depicting it. It does so by attending to and re-presenting the actual experience of depth as a relationship between entities which are perceived all at once in a continuum. Depth is not understandable as void between objects. And painting shows this because the painter must represent space with the same stuff—paint—as they represent objects. Painting, in other words, embodies a philosophical idea; and the work of Cézanne demonstrates this because he treats space and objects in the same way, as something to be represented in terms of the two dimensions of the picture plane. Merleau-Ponty says: A painter cannot agree [with the Cartesian outlook] that our openness to the world is illusory or indirect, that what we see is not the world itself, or that the mind has to do only with its thoughts or another mind. . . . We must take literally what vision teaches us: namely that through it we touch the sun and

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In other words, the painter intuitively experiences the world as a phenomenologist; that is an embodied subject situated within an intentional horizon where consciousness comes into being through its grasping of the objects of that consciousness. In short, the importance of modernist paintings are that, they re-present the conditions of experience. The modernist painter shows that perception involves placing ones multi-sensory body in relation to the world that surrounds that body and with which it interacts. Merleau-Ponty continues this theme in “Cézanne’s Doubt,” where he observes that the painter made a basic distinction not between “the senses” and “the understanding” but rather between the spontaneous organization of the things we perceive and the human organization of ideas and sciences. We see things; we agree about them; we are anchored in them; and it is with “nature” as our base that we construct our sciences. Cézanne wanted to paint this primordial world. 51

The “primordial world” is immediate and fully sensual and is subsequently different from a world depicted through either geometric schemata or photographic images. It is not a purely visual world or merely an image but one in which our full bodies are fully, corporeally immersed. Cézanne’s paintings show this because he “did not think he had to choose between feeling and thought, between order and chaos. He did not want to separate the stable things which we see and the shifting way in which they appear; he wanted to depict matter as it takes on form, the birth of order through spontaneous organization.” 52 We do not just see a world, but experience it with our entire body. That is to say we are both constantly projecting meanings and possibilities onto to it and being affected by it in ways which are inherently and profoundly multisensory. We do not merely see the world, through the sole medium of light through which the truth of its conditions are revealed to us. Instead we are corporeally immersed within the world and folded into it. This is what Merleau-Ponty sees as the modernist painter having intuited. By using paint as an aesthetic subject matter in its own right, they paint the tactile qualities of seeing too. In thus doing they give an aesthetic form to light in the medium of paint. Modernist paintings in the terms of my argument are a visual form of the absolute metaphor of light and, hence, bring something into view that is normally overlooked.

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CÉZANNE I conclude with a brief discussion of Cézanne where it is demonstrated how his paintings give a particular, sensuous form to light and hence render it available as an object of both aesthetic and philosophical reflection. It is my claim that Cézanne’s paintings give an aesthetic articulation to the primordial role of light in structuring a fundamental aspect of experience. His paintings can be viewed as an absolute metaphor. Consider the painting, Mont Sainte-Victoire. 53 This is one of the second series of paintings Cézanne made of the Mont Sainte-Victoire in the early 1900s just before his death in 1906. He made eleven canvases and numerous watercolors of the mountain from this view, which was just north of his studio on the Chemin des Lauves, Aix-en-Provence. His repetition of this motif was, in his own terms, obstinate. 54 Yet each image is clearly different from each other suggesting that his primary concern was not to depict a single view objectively, but rather chart the different experiences of the landscape according to different conditions. This is born out in slight changes that can be observed in the artist’s position and perspective in different paintings; and clear differences, too in environmental circumstances. However, as in all Cézanne’s work, this is not impressionistic in tone or style. It represents, instead, an attempt to paint landscape as a lived experience. In Cézanne’s case this was a particularly intense experience, and Joachim Gasquet recalls Cézanne talking about the view as if on fire with a purifying light: Look at Sainte-Victoire there. What élan, what imperious thirst for the sun, and what melancholy in the evening, when all that weight sinks back! . . . Those blocks were made of fire. There’s still some fire in them. During the day, shadows seem to draw back with a shiver, to be afraid of them. Plato’s cave is up there; note how, when large clouds pass overhead, their shadows quiver on the rocks as if burnt up, instantly consumed by a mouth of fire. 55

Cézanne’s intention, then, was “to paint after nature [which] is not to copy objective reality but to realize one’s sensation.” 56 What we view in these paintings is a series of subjective views of different landscapes. They are not multiple perspectives on an objective landscape pictured at particular moments in time. Instead, they are different landscapes because they appear under differing conditions of sensation. Mont Sainte-Victoire depicts a plain in southern France with buildings and vegetation in the bottom two-thirds of the painting rendered through a patchwork of mostly green and tan paint with some black at the bottom. The top third of the painting represents sky, rendered in muted blues, greys and white. In the midst of this top third the motif of the mountain centrally appears.

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The mountain is rendered using the same colors as the sky and is not sharply delineated. The effect of this is to disrupt its status as a figure in distinction to any ground, be that the sky behind or the landscape beneath. In other words the mountain does not lie in front of the sky or behind the landscape, but is rather one element amongst these. This disruption of the figure–ground relationship creates a sensation of integration on the picture plane which presents itself as unified into a flat surface. This unification of the picture plane is achieved, predominantly, through two techniques. First, the surface is mostly comprised of short brushstrokes which appear to have been quickly applied. They are thick, pronounced and created a chequered effect. This interrupts any clear sense of pictorial hierarchy in either the internal logic of the composition (that is, from top to bottom and from side to side) and the organisation of any virtual space (that is a foreground, mid-ground and background). The medium of paint is prior to both the landscape and the composition; which is to say that the image is conceptually and aesthetically subordinate to the pattern of painted marks through which it is painted. In the terms relevant to my argument, the light in the landscape in Provence has been translated into paint through brushstrokes; and Cézanne has done this in such a way as to present the painted marks as the subject matter in itself. He has made light solid. Second, the picture plane is unified through color. Cézanne models his pictorial forms with colors rather than with outlines or shadows. He uses dappled overlapping of brushstrokes to build up the picture plane. Hence, figure and ground are established through tonal differentiation rather than use of line or chiaroscuro. This represents a particular handling of the effects of light in a specifically painterly way. In the painting the unification of the picture plane through color is further achieved through the use of a limited palette. The greens of the foreground where they seem to represent vegetation are the same greens as seen in the landscape of the mid ground. But these greens also appear in the sky too, creating a visual continuity between fore, mid, and backgrounds. This effect is duplicated in the use of blue too and one can see flecks of the blue of the sky in various passages in the landscape including in the building toward the bottom left. In similar terms to those noted above, the light in the landscape in Provence has also been translated into paint through color. As with the brushstrokes, Cézanne has done this in such a way as to present the color on the canvas as another dimension of his subject matter. He has made light into color, and we can see it. In his use of brushstrokes and color as a primary subject matter, Cézanne has depicted a feature of the world as it is directly experienced prior to being conceptualized; that is as a continuum of simultaneously available perceptions. As Merleau-Ponty observed, this is authentic because “the world is a mass without gaps, a system of colors across which the receding perspective,

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the outlines, angles and curves are inscribed like lines of force; the spatial structure vibrates as it is formed.” 57 In the most basic terms, there is no geometric perspective used in this painting. Merleau-Ponty also recognized this as a strength of the work and observed that this corresponded more directly to lived experience because it meant that objects were treated as they presented themselves in perception and not according to an abstract schema. Hence it stood in opposition to traditional modeling techniques, in which “the contour of an object conceived as a line encircling the object belongs not to the visible world but to geometry.” 58 This is also one of the cues which Picasso and Braque and, slightly later, artists working in the Cubist idiom took from Cézanne. As Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger observed in their work on Cubism, “Cézanne’s work [proves] that painting is not—or is no longer—the art of understanding an object by means of lines and colors but the art of giving our instinct a plastic consciousness.” 59 When painting is conceived in these terms—that of finding a form for experience—a particular interpretation can be given of Cézanne’s most famous and misunderstood claim to “deal with nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone, all placed in perspective, so that each side of an object or a plane is directed towards a central point.” 60 This does not mean that nature should be made geometric in order that it may be more accurately represented. Instead it is a call for artists to depict direct experience according to the medium and techniques of paint. That is, to translate the immediacy of perception into paint requires that the painter acknowledges both the conditions of that experience and those of the medium as well. This was recognised by his contemporary, Emile Bernard, who noted that Cézanne “sees things, not in themselves, but in their direct rapport with painting”; 61 that is, through the conditions of the medium. Cézanne is painting not according to an abstracted conceptual schema, but rather the “lived-perspective.” He does not paint according to learned techniques from the history of art (perspective, chiaroscuro, etc.) precisely because, as Johnson puts it: “That is not the way vision works, even when an object is fixed immobile before us.” 62 In other words, Cézanne was trying to paint the way in which we actually experience the world with all our senses simultaneously in an embodied experience. As Merleau-Ponty states: No longer is it a matter of speaking about space and light, but of making space and light which are there, speak to us. . . . This philosophy which has yet to be elaborated, is what animates the painter—not when he expresses his opinions about the world but in that instant when his vision becomes gesture, when, in Cézanne’s words, he “thinks in painting.” 63

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In conclusion, I propose here that what Cézanne thinks in painting is something fundamental: about light and hence, through this experience. Blumenberg’s claim is that thought is structured by tacit assumptions that precede conceptualization and lie submerged and hidden within it. These take the form of absolute metaphors which compel basic, naive even, questions which are at one and the same time unanswerable as they cannot be fully conceptualized, and yet also unavoidable as they form the very basis for thought. Cézanne’s paintings give, I argue, another form to such absolute metaphors. And in doing so provide another means by which aesthetic practices can be used to think the unthinkable. REFERENCES Adams, David. “Metaphors for Mankind: The Development of Hans Blumenberg’s Anthropological Metaphorology.” Journal of the History of Ideas 52, no. 1 (Jan–Mar, 1997), 152–66. doi:10.2307/2709587. Auerbach, David. “Hans Blumenberg and His Myth Science Arkestra.” Ready Steady Book, August 7, 2011. http://www.readysteadybook.com /Article.aspx?page=hansblumenberg. Blumenberg, Hans. The Genesis of the Copernican World .Translated by Robert M. Wallace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. ———. ‘“Imitation of Nature’: Toward a Prehistory of the Idea of the Creative Being.” Qui Parle 12, no 1. (Spring/Summer, 2000), 17–54. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20686110. ———. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Translated by Robert M. Wallace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985. ———. “Light as a Metaphor for Truth.” In Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, edited by David Michael Levin, 30–62. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. ———. Paradigms for a Metaphorology. Translated by Robert Savage. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. ———. “Prospect for a Theory of Nonconceptuality.” In Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, translated by Steven Rendall, 81–102. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. ———. Work on Myth. Translated by Robert M. Wallace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988. Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Volume 2, Mythical Thought. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955. Cazeaux, Clive. Metaphor and Continental Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2007. Cézanne, Paul. “Letter to Émile Bernhard, 15 April 1904.” In Letters of the Great Artists: From Blake to Pollock, edited by Richard Friedenthal, 184. London: Thames and Hudson, 1963. ———. “Letter to Vollard—Aix, 9 January, 1903.” In Cézanne, by Ambroise Vollard, 103. New York: Dover, 1984. ———. “Mont Sainte-Victoire,” oil on canvas, 1902–1904 (Philadelphia Museum of Art). http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/102997.html. Gasquet, Joachim. Joachim Gasquet’s Cézanne: A Memoir with Conversations. Translated by Christopher Pemberton. London: Thames and Hudson, 1991. Gleizes, Albert, and Jean Metzinger. “Cubism.” In Modern Artists on Art, 2nd ed., edited by Robert Herbert, 1–16. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2000. Gordon, Peter Eli. Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos. Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Haverkamp, Anselm. “Blumenberg, Hans.” In Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 2nd ed., edited by Michael Kelly, 408–10. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Heidegger, Martin. “The Self-Assertion of the German University and the Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts.” Translated by Karsten Harries. Review of Metaphysics 38, no. 3 (March 1985): 467–502. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20128182.

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Husserl, Edmund. “The Origin of Geometry.” In Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, translated by Leonard Lawlor and Bettina Bergo, 93–116. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002. Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Johnson, Galen. The Retrieval of the Beautiful: Thinking through Merleau-Ponty’s Aesthetics. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003. Löwith, Karl. Meaning in History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Cézanne’s Doubt.” In The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, compiled by Galen A. Johnson and edited by Michael B. Smith, 59–75. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993. ———. “Eye and Mind.” In The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, compiled by Galen A. Johnson and edited by Michael B. Smith, 121–49. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993. ———. “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence.” In The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, compiled by Galen A. Johnson and edited by Michael B. Smith, 76–120. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993. ———. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald Landes. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2012. ———. “Philosophy and Non-philosophy Since Hegel.” In Philosophy and Non-philosophy Since Hegel, edited by Hugh J. Silverman, 9–83. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997. ———. The World of Perception. London: Routledge, 2004. Pavesich,Vida. “Hans Blumenberg’s Philosophical Anthropology: After Heidegger and Cassirer.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 46, no. 3 (2008): 421–48. doi:10.1353/hph.0.0031. Wechsler, Judith. The Interpretation of Cézanne. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1981.

NOTES 1. Cézanne, “Letter to Émile Bernhard, 15 April 1904,” 45; Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 129. 2. Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, 14. 3. Blumenberg, “Imitation of Nature,” 40. 4. Ibid., 45. 5. Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” 66. 6. Jay, Downcast Eyes, 306. 7. Merleau-Ponty, “Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Hegel.” 8. Johnson, The Retrieval of the Beautiful, 47. 9. Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” 93–94. 10. Ibid., 94. 11. Johnson, The Retrieval of the Beautiful, 64. 12. Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. 13. Gordon, Continental Divide, 31. 14. Adams, “Metaphors for Mankind,” 153. 15. Heidegger, cited in Adams, “Metaphors for Mankind,” 153. See also Heidegger, “The Self-Assertion.” 16. Haverkamp, “Blumenberg, Hans,” 408. 17. Blumenberg most directly engages with Löwith; see Löwith, Meaning in History. 18. Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 14. 19. Ibid., 65. 20. Ibid., 27. 21. Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, 5. 22. Blumenberg, “Prospect for a Theory of Nonconceptuality.” 23. Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 159.

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24. Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, 3. 25. Ibid., 3. 26. Blumenberg, “Prospect for a Theory of Nonconceptuality,” 82. 27. Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, 3. 28. Ibid., 5. 29. Blumenberg, “Prospect for a Theory of Nonconceptuality,” 97. 30. Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, 14. 31. “As the expression ‘a priori’ indicates, it lays claim to a strictly unconditioned and truly apodictic self-evidence extending beyond all historical facticities. . . . Every people has its ‘logic’ and, accordingly, if this logic is explicated in propositions, its ‘a priori.’” Husserl, “The Origin of Geometry,” 110. 32. Pavesich, “Hans Blumenberg’s Philosophical Anthropology,” 438. 33. Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, 3. 34. Ibid., 5. 35. Ibid., 5. 36. Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By. 37. Cazeaux, Metaphor and Continental Philosophy, 79. 38. Blumenberg, “Prospect for a Theory of Nonconceptuality,” 98. 39. Auerbach, “Hans Blumenberg and His Myth Science Arkestra.” 40. Blumenberg, “Light as a Metaphor for Truth,” 31. 41. Ibid. 42. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. 43. Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, 93. 44. Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 35. 45. Ibid., 181. 46. Ibid., 121. 47. Ibid., 123. 48. Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, 8. 49. Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 123. 50. Ibid., 146. 51. Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” 64. 52. Ibid., 63. 53. Cézanne, “Mont Sainte-Victoire.” 54. “I work obstinately, and once in a while I catch a glimpse of the Promised Land. Am I to be like the great leader of the Hebrews, or will I really attain unto it?” Cézanne, “Letter to Vollard,” 103. 55. Gasquet, Cézanne, 82–83. 56. Cézanne, quoted in Wechsler, The Interpretation of Cézanne, 29. 57. Merleau-Ponty, Cézanne’s Doubt, 65. 58. Ibid. 59. Gleizes and Metzinger, “Cubism,” 3. 60. Cézanne, “Letter to Émile Bernhard,” 180. 61. Bernard, quoted by Johnson, The Retrieval of the Beautiful, 49. 62. Johnson, The Retrieval of the Beautiful, 51. 63. Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 138–39.

Index

Ackerman, Bruce, 141 Adams, David, 184 Adorno, Theodore W., 184 Alterman, Eric, 96 Althusser, Louis, 4, 8, 9, 12, 16 Apel, Dora, 150, 154 Anden-Papadopoulos, Kari, 139 Antonioni, Michelangelo, xxxi, 167–177 Aristotle, xx Auerbach, David, 188 Austin, J. L., 19 Backer, David, xxvii Barthes, Roland, 157, 171–172 Baudrillard, Jean, 151 Benen, Steve, 93 Benjamin, Walter, 184 Bermanzohn, Sally, 47, 48 Bernard, Emile, 195 Bierce, Ambrose, 93 bin Laden, Osama, xii Blair, Tony, xiii Blix, Hans, xiii Blumenberg, Hans, xxxi, 181, 182, 184–189 Bohman, James, 35 Boorstin, Daniel, 175 Brown, Michael, 63 Bush, George W., xi–xiv, xviii, xxv, 96, 137 Butler, Judith, 16, 151

Buzzel, Colby, 152 Carmichael, Stokley, 72 Carroll, Kathleen, 13–14 Carroll, Lewis, 102 Cassirer, Ernst, 184 Cazeaux, Clive, 188 Cezanne, Paul, xxxi, 181–196 Cha-Jua, Sundiata Keita, 74 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 69 Cheney, Dick, xii Clausewitz, Carl von, xviii Clinton, Bill, xii Coates, Ta-Nehisi, 64 Colbert, Stephen, xvii, xxix, 94–108 Conant, James, xxiv, xxv Cone, James H., 72, 73 Conversino, Mark, 151 Cook, Martin, 151 Copernicus, 185, 188 Davidson, Donald, xx, xxvi, xxvii Deleuze, Gilles, 95, 98, 99 Derrida, Jacques, xix Descartes, Rene, xx, 136, 188, 189 Dewey, John, 66, 82 Dorril, Stephen, 175 Douglass, Frederick, 71 DuBois, W. E. B., 65, 71 Eisenstein, Sergei, 171, 172 199

200

Index

Elbaradei, Mohammed, xiii

Johnson, Mark, 188

Fanon, Frantz, 69 Fenton, Roger, 149 Field, Harry, xxii Florini, Sarah, 54 Foucault, Michel, xix, 16, 55, 69, 70, 99, 106 Frege, Gottlob, xxvii Freire, Paulo, 83 Fussell, Paul, 137

Kagan, Robert, xii Kahneman, Daniel, 33, 34 Kant, Immanuel, xx, 99 Katz, Elihu, 30 Keane, John, 35 Keeler, Christine, 175, 176 Kennedy, John F., xxi, 175, 176, 177 Kennedy, Liam, 137, 151, 152, 153 Kesley, Robin, 161 Kessler, Glenn, 116 Keyes, Ralph, 96 King, Dr. Martin Luther, 64, 68, 70, 71, 73 Kristol, William, xii Krugman, Paul, 97 Kyl, Jon, xxix, 93, 95, 102, 103, 104

Galileo, 188 Garner, Eric, 11 Gates, Robert, 150 Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth, 45 Gilroy, Paul, 74 Gingrich, Newt, 93 Gleizes, Albert, 195 Gordon, Michael, xii Gordon, Peter Eli, 184 Gore, Al, 10 Graeber, David, 10 Gramsci, Antonio, 4, 5, 10 Grossberg, Lawrence, 95 Guevara, Che, 14 Habermas, Jurgen, xxviii, 18, 23–35, 106, 184 Haidt, Jonathan, 34 Hariman, Robert, 137 Hartley, Jason, xxxi, 151–161 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, xx Heidegger, Martin, 184, 186 Hemingway, Ernest, xxx, 135, 140 Hemmings, David, 168 Heraclitus, 188 Heubler, Douglas, 174 Holden, Jeremy, 97 Horwich, Paul, xxii Hussein, Sadam, xii, xiii Husserl, Edmund, 187 Hyde, Michael, 57 Jacobson, Julie, 150 Jacotot, Joseph, 79, 88 James, William, xxii, 66, 81, 99 Jay, Martin, 183 Johnson, Galen, 183

Lakoff, George, 188 Larsen, Thomas, 139 Lasswell, Harold, 115 Lazarsfeld, Paul Felix, 30 Lecercle, Jacques, xxvii, 4, 10, 16 Lenin, V. I., 4, 5 Levy, Ariel, 15–16 Lowith, Karl, 185 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 18, 19, 107 Maher, Bill, xvii Marker, Chris, 171 Martin, Trayvon, 63 Marx, Karl, xxvii, 4, 5, 6, 70, 81 McCain, John, xiv McCullin, Don, 174 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, xxxi, 181, 182, 189–192 Metzinger, Jean, 195 Miller, Judith, xii Milton, John, 99 Moore, G. W., xxvii Morley, Lewis, 176 Nardelli, Matilde, 173 Newhouse, Neil, 97 Newton, Huey P., 70 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xix, 94, 99 Obama, Barack, xv, xvi, 3, 28, 102, 120, 121, 125, 126, 127, 129, 156

Index Oliver, John, xvii Orwell, George, xxiv–xxv, 96 Palin, Sarah, xiv, xv, xvi, xxv Pariser, Eli, 100 Pavesich, Vida, 187 Pecheux, Michel, 16 Peirce, Charles, xxi, xxii Peters, Bernhard, 25 Peters, John Durham, 136 Plato, xix, 82, 189 Poe, Edgar Allan, 169 Powell, Colin, xiii Price, Huw, xxiii Profumo, John, 175 Quine, Willard Van Orman, xxii Ranciere, Jacques, xxix, 79–88 Reagan, Ronald, xiii Redgrave, Vanessa, 176 Rice, Condoleezza, xii Romney, Mitt, 97 Rorty, Richard, xix–xxiv, xxix, 107 Rose, Charlie, 97 Rumsfeld, Donald, xiii Ruscha, Ed, 173 Russel, Bertrand, xxii, xxvii Ryan, Paul, 97 Said, Edward, 69 Sanders, Bernie, 18 Schiappa, Edward, 106 Schmitt, Carl, 185 Schudson, Michael, 35 Seale, Bobby, 70

201

Soloway, Jill, 15–16 Sontag, Susan, 153 Spinoza, Baruch, 99 Stevenson, Adlai, 176 Stewart, Jon, xvii, 93 Stieglitz, Joseph, 10 Strauss, Claude Levi, 34 Summers, Anthony, 175 Sunstein, Cass, 32 Surowiecki, James, 98 Talbot, William Henry Fox, 168–169 Tarski, Alfred, xxvii Taylor, John, 161 Tennyson, Alfred, 149 Tompkins, Paula, 136 Trump, Donald, xvi–xvii, xxv, 4, 9–10, 106 Turner, Nat, 71 Tversky, Amos, 33, 34 Virillio, Paul, 151 Vološinov, Valentin, xxvii, 16, 17, 18, 19 Weber, Max, 185 West, Cornel, xxix, 64, 65, 66 Whitehead, Alfred North, xx Williams, Raymond, 95, 101 Wilson, Joe, xii Zapruder, Abraham, 177 Zelizer, Barbie, 158 Zimmerman, George, 63 Žižek, Slavoj, 16 Zwicky, Arnold, 97

About the Contributors

David I. Backer is a teacher and activist living in Philadelphia. He is assistant professor of social and cultural foundations of education at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. You can find links to his work at www.davidbacker.com. Chris Balaschak (PhD, University of California, Irvine) is an assistant professor of art history in the Art and Design department at Flagler College. His research focuses on photography’s relationship with democracy, with a particular interest in the legacy of American social documentary practices, the reproduction and circulation of photographic images in the public sphere, and the role of visual culture in constructing community and place. Makeda Best is a historian of photography. She teaches at the California College of Art, where she is an assistant professor in the Visual Studies Program. She is working on a book on the Civil War era photographer Alexander Gardner (currently in final review), and she is co-editor of the forthcoming anthology, Conflict, Identity, and Protest in American Art. Additional forthcoming publications address architecture, slavery, and memory in Civil War photography. She received her PhD in art history from Harvard University in 2010. Charles Bingham is currently professor of education at Simon Fraser University. His wide variety of teaching experiences started with teaching English and mathematics in the rural district of Transkei, South Africa, and continued in the K–12 setting for over eleven years. He then taught at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois, as an assistant professor after which he came to the Faculty of Education at SFU. Dr. Bingham’s research interests include 203

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About the Contributors

investigating philosophical perspectives on curriculum and education, with sustained research into the concepts of educational recognition, educational authority, educational relations, and educational truth. His writings on these topics is philosophical, but very practical as well. Some of the thinkers that inform his work are Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Franz Fanon, Jessica Benjamin, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Jacques Rancière. Lewis A. Friedland (PhD, Brandeis University, 1985) is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he is affiliated with the departments of sociology and educational psychology and directs the Center for Communication and Democracy. His interests are the changing structure of the civil society and the public sphere in a networked era and new models of community communication ecologies. Christopher Gilbert is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University. His dissertation examines the role of political caricature as a wartime art of national character. His research focuses on questions of collective and civic identity in comic rhetorics. He has published in the Western Journal of Communication, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Review of Communication, and Critical Studies in Media Communication. Francis Halsall is lecturer in the history/theory of modern and contemporary art at National College of Art and Design, Dublin, where he is co-director of MA Art in the Contemporary World (www.acw.ie). He has an MA and PhD in art history on systems aesthetics and art after modernism from Glasgow University and is completing a PhD in philosophy on Niklas Luhmann’s aesthetics at University College Dublin. Recent academic publications include the books Systems of Art, with a foreword by Kitty Zijlmans (2008); and the coedited collections Rediscovering Aesthetics, with Julia Jansen and Tony O’Connor (2009); and Aesthetic Practices and Critical Communities: Art, Politics, Friendship, with Julia Jansen and Sinead Murphy (2012); and the articles “Chaos, Fractals and the Pedagogical Challenge of Jackson Pollock’s ‘All-Over’ Paintings” in the Journal of Aesthetic Education (2009); and “Strategic Amnesia (on art history in Ireland in the 21st century)” in the Irish Review (2008). Jason Hannan is assistant professor in the Department of Rhetoric, Writing, and Communications at the University of Winnipeg. He is the editor of Philosophical Profiles in the Theory of Communication (2012). His research interests include bioethics and medical humanities, rhetoric and political theory, and the philosophy of communication. His articles have appeared in

About the Contributors

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Communication Theory; Contemporary Pragmatism; Review of Communication; Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication; RASK: International Journal for Language and Communication; and Intellectual History Review. Thomas Hove (PhD, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, 1998; PhD, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2007) is a professor in the Department of Advertising and Public Relations at Hanyang University, South Korea. His research interests include media ethics, professional persuasion, health communication, and the sociology of mass communication. Jeffrey W. Jarman (PhD, University of Kansas) is the director of debate and associate director of the Elliott School of Communication at Wichita State University. His research interests include the effect of presidential debates and the role of the media in shaping the quality of deliberation in the public sphere. His research has appeared in American Behavioral Scientist, Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, and multiple edited volumes of the biennial Alta Conference on Argumentation. Spoma Jovanovic is a professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Since 2001, she has been collaborating with community members on programs designed to enhance ethical conversations and action related to civic literacy, cultural understanding, democratic participation, and social justice. She is the author of Democracy, Dialogue and Community Action: Truth and Reconciliation in Greensboro (2012), that chronicles the twin historic feats of the first truth and reconciliation commission in the United States and the first such process initiated and carried out not by government mandate, but instead by a democratic people’s effort. Her research has also been published in two dozen articles and book chapters, including in the Journal of Applied Communication Research; Philosophy and Rhetoric; Communication Quarterly; and Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement. Yacine Kout is a doctoral student in the Educational Leadership and Cultural Foundations program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His interests include critical pedagogy in schooling and the overlaps between gaming, social justice, and education. Kout has presented papers at regional and national conferences. Paul Lawrie (PhD University of Toronto) is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Winnipeg. His research interests include modern social and cultural American, African American, labor, urban, and disability histories. He has published in Disability Histories (2014);

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About the Contributors

The Oxford Handbook of Disability History (2015), and his article, “Mortality as the Life Story of a People: Frederick L. Hoffman and Actuarial Narratives of African American Extinction, 1896–1915” won the 2014 Ernest Redekop prize for best article in the Canadian Review of American Studies. He is also the author of Forging a Laboring Race: The African American Worker in the Progressive Imagination (2016) and is currently at work on a second manuscript project on the temporal dynamics of race and urban political economy in postwar Detroit tentatively titled Running on Colored Peoples Time in the Motor City. Jeanette Musselwhite received her master’s degree in communication studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her research interests include critical pedagogy, social movement rhetoric, and intercultural communication with a focus on social media and popular culture. She is the editorial assistant for Partnerships: A Journal of Service-Learning and Civic Engagement. Kelly M. O’Donnell is pursuing her master’s degree in communication studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her research interests include political rhetoric, critical pedagogy, and how the two intersect on social media platforms. Lisa Silvestri (PhD, University of Iowa) is assistant professor of communication studies at Gonzaga University. She has an MA in communication and culture from Indiana University. Her research interests focus on American politics and popular culture with a special focus on war and social media. Her work engages most deeply with the ethical and moral dimensions of digital culture and the problem of war. She is the author of Friended at the Front: Social Media and 21st Century War (2015). Some of her recent publications appear in Media War and Conflict; The Review of Communication; Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal; and Visual Communication Quarterly. Shelley Sizemore is a doctoral student in the Educational Leadership and Cultural Foundations program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the associate director of advocacy programs and civic education in Wake Forest University’s Pro Humanitate Institute. Her research interests include social movement rhetoric and theory, college student identity development and activism, and critical pedagogy. Sizemore has presented papers and workshops at national communication, rhetoric, and student personnel administrator conferences.

About the Contributors

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Jenny Southard received her master’s degree in communication studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro where she worked at the campus Speaking Center. Her research interests include communication and critical pedagogy, women’s studies, and relational and intercultural communication with an emphasis on peer and group collaboration.