This text is the rough outline of a guest lecture given by Possible Worlds' Josh Hall at Central Saint Martins in May 2024, as part of a seminar on the MA Applied Imagination course. The topic of the event was 'Truth in contemporary digital publishing'.
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This isn't so much a crisis of journalism or of truth, but rather a crisis of meaning. And that is inseparable from the ongoing crisis of power - in fact, they are the same thing.
Meaning is malleable or pliable. Anyone who has ever thought in any depth whatsoever about language has of course already understood this, but apparently it has come as a surprise to the people who have assumed responsibility for managing and disciplining our societies.
Contemporary ideas of 'truth' and objectivity, along with the various conceptual apparatuses required to scaffold them, are organising principles that have developed in tandem with a historically specific social order - the post-Enlightenment, broadly science-led society that we currently inhabit. 'Truth' in a journalistic sense is essentially a technical measure - it's something that we say can be validated according to agreed principles, and the ways that we do that are hard-coded into the industry that journalism has grown into, for example through professional best practices, regulatory requirements, and so on. This technical activity is now seen as existentially important - not because it allows us to hold power to account but rather because, to the broadly liberal-democratic political order, it is suddenly seen as crucial for the maintenance of that power.
If truth must be validated, we are required to appeal to some sort of third party or 'great other'. One of the defining developments of the last decade, maybe post-2008 and certainly post-COVID, is the realisation that the great other doesn't exist. The state has no guarantor, and therefore neither does 'truth'.
It's easy to confuse symptom and cause, i.e. to say that 'democracy' is 'dying' because we don't believe in truth anymore, or value truth, or that the electorate has been hoodwinked by 'bad actors', or that we no longer have an electorate that is sufficiently well-attuned to these questions to meaningfully hold up their end of the political bargain. But we reap what we sow - neoliberal/late capitalist government/statecraft has been about the maintenance of a very specific form or social organisation, which is now ending. Now that the social contract is going through its final unwinding, all of the a prioris that were required for its maintenance are suddenly in contention.
Again, this phase of capitalist development is hardly surprising to anyone who has had a passing interest in leftist thought, but the political class has failed to understand the new reality until far too late. The western mode of government is now almost entirely technocratic - there are no more ideas, only management. Through a combination of factors including specific policy decisions, the extraordinary decline in the intellectual calibre of the political class, and the rest of the apparatus of the ideology-not-ideology of capitalist realism, the political sphere has been almost totally evacuated of ideas. It has no exit strategy, nor does it have the ability to articulate a meaningful or even plausible idea of the future. The horizons of the political imagination have never been closer. Meanwhile what we might refer to as the 'general intellect' - the collective politico-philosophical consciousness of the people - has progressed at an extraordinary, mind-bending rate. The comprehension gap between the average person in Western society and the average professional politician has never been more pronounced, a development mirrored by the increasingly unbridgeable intellectual distance between Boomers and everyone else. The asset-hoarding generation has suddenly realised it has nothing but those assets - no conceptual framework through which to approach the contemporary moment; no ability to do the intellectual work it requires; seemingly no desire to escape the death-spiral. To borrow from Noel Gallagher, these are people with a global monopoly on forks, suddenly adrift in a world of soup.
One of the symptoms of this crisis is of course the explosion of so-called conspiracy theories. It's particularly interesting that the 15 minute city theory, which intersects or closely tessellates with anti-vax, anti-ULEZ, and cashless society concerns, has become such a flashpoint for working class anger. The vaguely anthropological pearl-clutching about 'conspiracies' is of course wilfully blind to the crucial truth at their heart. The conspiracy theorist's observation about a given situation is often absolutely correct. Yes, there is a small group of elite initiates who control the global economy. But they're not Masons, they're the ruling class. Or alternatively, yes, it is absolutely correct that the state wants to manage your purchasing decisions and monitor your movements - but that's not in order to facilitate more lockdowns, but rather because an ever-increasing degree of surveillance and control is a fundamental requirement for the maintenance of the current social order.
This is not a cyclical crisis, but an existential one. The contradictions immanent to capitalism have exceeded the system's capacity to mitigate them. To return to language specifically: we could say that modernism was about the production of meaning or the accumulation of definitions; postmodernism, meanwhile, is about the circulation and interplay of those definitions, just as the focus of 'developed' economies has shifted from production to circulation. Language in postmodernism consists of signifiers that float freely, untethered from rational definition - the perfect mirror of financialised economies, in which increasingly abstract spheres of mathematical confection interact more or less autonomously. In a very real sense, meaning is simply no longer a meaningful conceptual category.
Clearly we are in a period of deep retrenchment. We need to double down on the creation and maintenance of our own spaces, and continue building our own exit routes. In practical terms that means getting off the monolithic social-publishing platforms and instead joining and contributing to the open source and federated social communities. It means reclaiming physical space from capital, including through squatting and occupation. It means active contestation on the streets. There is a huge wealth of experience and expertise that can help us do this, both here and abroad. The end of capitalism is not a loss, although there will of course be serious and significant pain. Let's think about what we want to salvage.
