Post-factual age: “Publics between fact and fiction”: Radically told

A clear sign of the crisis of society as a whole are the superlatives with which its desolate state is negotiated – above all that of its civic heart: the public. From fake news, conspiracy thinking and populist affective politics, this has passed into a “post-factual age” and pushed into a “crisis of truth”, to the point of shaking the foundations of democracy. The crisis semantics is itself a crisis phenomenon. Because: What do we do with these alarming and fundamental diagnoses?

The answer is usually: nothing. Neither climate change nor fascism or at least the collapse of democracy are being addressed in the face of the most obvious threats. This powerlessness of people itself says something about the state of the public. After all, this is supposed to be the central institution for the formation of opinions and political will, which replaces the coercion of authority in modern Western societies. It is worrying when reason and argument, however damaged they may have been, give way to the arbitrariness of perceived truths and instrumental bias, leaving only apathy or false radicalization as modes of public exchange. It therefore seems quite urgent to look at this connection with some prudence, i.e. at how our present actually relates to the production of knowledge about ourselves. The anthology “Publics between Fact and Fiction” has set itself the task of doing this – the fact that it does not require a new overall formula for the crisis and a sensational diagnosis of the present is, first of all, to its credit.

Modern truth problem

This strength initially appears as modesty when the editors Steffi Hobuß, Simone Jung and Sven Kramer speak of “samples and deep drilling” that they carry out in the fields of science, media and art “in relation to the relationship between fact and fiction the public”. The project, which emerged from a public lecture series at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg in 2021, is intentionally experimental and therefore does not follow a grand narrative of contemporary crises; these are more likely to become the subject of those surveys.

The editors therefore state that the boundary between fact and fiction in a complex and differentiated society cannot be easily determined, at least not without betraying a basic condition of modernity: the rejection of established authority. Modern society is therefore inscribed with a certain crisis regarding the truth. A return to secure objectivity is neither to be expected nor desirable, regardless of how great the political pressure to act is due to false references to reality and impending catastrophes.

The technological philosopher and dramaturg Alfred Nordmann traces something of this constitutive crisis of objectivity in his contribution to “how science itself has contributed to a crisis of its trustworthiness.” In a public that is increasingly skeptical of science, science tends to gain trust by presenting itself as a reliable technology – in the form of so-called technoscience. Although this orientation is accompanied by a “gain in phenomenon control,” it “means a loss of comprehensibility.” Who knows what goes on behind geoengineering and AI development anymore? All that remains is an assessment of the results and thus a kind of scientific “re-enchantment of the world”: “We have to believe in its successes without being allowed to understand them.” But this is precisely associated with a loss of social control, which contradicts the (scientific) ideal of enlightenment and thus creates the discomfort that breaks out into hostility to science.

Is everything relative?

In a similar way, the sociologist Jenni Brichzin deals with the much-invoked “crisis of truth” in the post-truth age and the question of whether postmodern relativism – or more precisely: anti-essentialism – can be attributed an “epistemic responsibility” for it. This discourse figure appears regularly: the relativism of certain approaches takes on a life of its own and ultimately leads to the fact that it is no longer possible to distinguish between right and wrong. Or the resulting politicization of knowledge results in “constant suspicion,” so that every discussion “has to move on to political positioning and struggle.” And finally, deconstruction can tip into destruction and can therefore also be used in right-wing strategies. Brichzin rejects these criticisms, as well as the pure affirmation of deconstruction, but for a rather idealistic, abstract reason: “There is no one ‘true’, ultimately correct, completely ‘good’ way of thinking.” Instead, she advocates “thinking along narrow lines.”

In the best case, this means a materialistic connection of thought forms to social conditions – or just further relativism that repeats the fundamental dilemma. The assumption that there is no truth remains an assumption that must be justified. In a certain sense, the philosopher Wolfgang Welsch defends this position when he examines the history of philosophy of the prevailing idea that fakes are the opposite of the truth. Even in Jean-François Lyotard, to whom the term postmodernism is attributed, Welsch finds the idea that relativization is “the key to the truth”. Because, so the argument goes, everything is related to one another in certain ways and “because of this general relationality, everything is relative.”

One would like to counter this by saying that even such relationality does not fall from heaven as a principle. It is a social condition that needs to be enlightened and not idealistically glorified. When, for example, the editor Steffi Hobuß, with Wittgenstein, justifiably rejects the need for simple truths, her conclusion remains toothless: “The desire to separate facts and fiction sharply and depending on the context usually leads to a trap.” The humility implicitly called for in these contributions in the face of the loss of all truth may itself have its share in the regressive defensive reactions, from belief in conspiracy to right-wing disinformation.

Fight against what has been told

More interesting than these scientific test drillings are the artistic contributions to the volume, above all the essay by the writer Kathrin Röggla, “The Untold.” Because it expresses the problem in which the volume is necessarily entangled: public reflection on the crisis of the public is always already linked to social conditions, the superlative of the crisis diagnosis is linked to apathy and powerlessness. She explains the loss of an imaginable or even shapeable future as the effect of radical presentism, a “permanent presence of the now, now, now,” “which voraciously incorporates all time.” Between live tickers, eternal repetition and predictability of a completely commodity-shaped world and the impending catastrophe, our present and future have already been radically told. This not only means the overproduction of information, but also the feeling that, in the face of self-destructive capitalism and regression, everything has actually already been said. We know it and yet we are powerless.

But Röggla goes beyond this statement. In prosaic experiments from her novel about the NSU trial or a play about climate change, she shows a constellation of procedures “to fight back for freedom from what has been told out by society.” And in fact this bet on the artistic possibility of having an experience beyond the existing seems to be paying off. In her contribution, the journalist and film critic Verena Lueken also attributes art’s potential for truth. She confronts the fake news of the “Trump story of regaining the heartland” with the essay film “Nomadland,” which shows the reality of nomadic people left behind in the USA, but adds a fictional character to it. In the editors’ conversation with the theater and filmmaker Milo Rau, he also reflects on the possibility of an encounter with the real in the performing arts – not as a realistic documentation, but as an experience of what eludes the narrated and managed world.

In view of these findings, what is honestly needed is a social theory that can explain, beyond those “samples”, the real connection between the social condition and the difficulties in overcoming it. By the way, this is an undertaking that is over 150 years old and, with its open questions and unused construction sites, is anything but untold.

Steffi Hobuß/Simone Jung/Sven Kramer (eds.): Publics between fact and fiction. On knowledge production in science, media and the arts. Criminal Publishing House, 240 pages, br., 24 €.