Abstract

Anyone who does not simply refuse to perceive decline will hasten to claim a special justification for his own personal existence, his activity and involvement in this chaos. There are as many exceptions for one's own sphere of action, place of residence, and moment of time as there are insights into the general failure. A blind determination to save the prestige of personal existence—rather than, through impartial disdain for its impotence and entanglement, at least to detach it from the background of universal delusion—is triumphing almost everywhere. That is why the air is so thick with life theories and world views, and why in this country they cut so presumptuous a figure, for almost always they finally serve to sanction some utterly trivial private situation. For just the same reason the air is teeming with phantoms, mirages of glorious cultural figures breaking upon us overnight in spite of it all, for everyone is committed to the optical illusions of his isolated standpoint.—Walter Benjamin, “Imperial Panorama, VIII,” One-Way Street It is difficult to see the question of truth. In the imperial panorama that so concerned Benjamin, the question of truth was disappeared by a war's seemingly endless violence. In this moment, now, it appears to disappear into the midst (though not the fog, not by the long shot—of our own inattention) of endless war, a violence that drones over Hannah Arendt's worry that it is “in the nature of the political realm to be at war with truth in all of its forms” (1993, 239) and drowns out Alexandre Koyré's pressing warning that the assertion and experience of “essential enmity” renders the lie not simply a virtue but a “primary and fundamental rule of behavior” ([1943] 2017, 146).Without question, there is now (again) deep and ongoing concern for the deficient or excessive state (inside and outside the nation-state) of truth and what is to be said and done in the apparent aftermath of veracity. Post-truth has provoked—no doubt, but perhaps not always well. From the left, right, and center, it has so often led into the cul-de-sac of what Foucault called “commentary,” a proliferating reiteration that has relied on a prominent but question-begging pronouncement about the definitive meaning of a “word of the year” to foreclose if not deter inquiry into the question of truth. More than a bit of this common cause is articulated and enacted in works such as Michiko Kakutani's The Death of Truth (2018). Though nearly unreadable for the pretension that covers its conceptual confusion (including an astonishing indifference to the implications of the mythology that is explicitly claimed—perhaps incorrectly—to abide in its title), this book takes care to tick all of the “proper” boxes: consistent and unrelenting terminological conflation (for example, and with no apparent need to consider their order, post-truth = fake news = alt-facts = lying = propaganda = opinion = subjectivity = extreme relativism = denialism, etc., etc.)—check; a call to cling with unwavering faith to the banister of a monolithic “science” (the call's simplicity recalls the sole and quaint “Science Building” that adorns the campus of Bob Jones University)—check; a pronounced aversion to any inquiry that would reflect on forms of truth and how such variety may underpin and trouble the expression of truth (i.e., there is no time for either dawdling philosophy or indulgent rhetoric)—check; an incoherent and cherry-picking tirade against something named “postmodernism,” an attack that consistently conflates (and refuses to actually read) inter alia structuralism, poststructuralism, constructivism, deconstruction, and genealogy, all in order to foment (or just foam) against the specter of a deeply confused notion of “subjectivity” and then rally for a return to proper and unified reason, one that appears unable to hear anything of Arendt's claim in “Lying in Politics,” that “moral outrage” will not facilitate an interest in truth and that the nonaccidental arrival of lying into politics is indicative of the fact that much “deliberate falsehood deals with contingent facts” (6; emphasis in original; it is telling that Kakutani excludes this idea from her own quotation of Arendt, see 12–13)—check, check, and check; the expressed wish to recover a pure and proper language for public life (and, on the down low, the unquestionable virtue of pragmatic prose, aka journalism), one that will somehow (remember—there can be no rhetoric and likely no speech-action) undo America's “deep division,” a divide that is itself never queried in terms of whether it amounts to stasis or a rather self-confirming (and defeating) conceit on the part of those who prefer not to hear anything but what they want to hear—check; shoot-from-the-hip warnings about the violent and totalitarian tendencies of a post-truth world, as if truth lacks any manner of coercion and as if there is not standing disagreement (not least among victims) as to what regimes make of truth claims and the various ways in which they do and do not make claims on truth—check.If the question of truth is too often hidden and overwritten by so much chatter, including the incoherent pronouncements of those who seem to believe that having character is the same thing as expression limited to 280 characters, the question reappears in the timely and challenging contributions that compose this special issue of Philosophy & Rhetoric. Indeed, the articles that follow shed different and crucial light on the emergence, dynamics, and stakes of life in the midst of post-truth—they also forge interesting connections with other recent work in the journal, including several of the contributions published in P&R's fiftieth anniversary issue (50:4, 2017). I want to express my sincere and full gratitude to Barbara Biesecker, who correctly insisted on the need for a special issue on post-truth, imagined its form and convened a distinguished group of contributors, and then tirelessly served as the issue's editor. It is an honor and a pleasure to work with Professor Biesecker, a genuine scholar and an ever so thoughtful colleague.