Our Post-Post-Truth Condition | Dominic Boyer

Dominic Boyer, whose work on expertise was a source of inspiration for Stefan
Beck, now takes up Beck’s thoughts on the translation of Erlebnisse into Erfah-
rungen in order to review the current crisis of liberalism in the United States. The
Director of the »Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human
Sciences« and Professor of Anthropology at Rice University in Houston points to
the lack of authentication of political elites’ expertise in relation to the lived ex-
periences of voters – and hopes that alternative expertise will arise from emerg-
ing experiences.

The rapid centering of hitherto fringe illiberal populism made 2016 an annus
horribilis for that ecology of expertise we know as mainstream northern politi-
cal liberalism. It is too early to tell exactly how much damage the events of 2016
will ultimately cause to the neoliberal pouvoir-savoir arrangement that has ex-
erted hegemony since the 1980s – the one in which ›the market‹ was promised
to unlock human capabilities and increase freedom and joy (but actually mas-
sively concentrated wealth and power) while ›the state‹ dealt death abroad and
at home in the name of maintaining orderly despair. At the time of this writing in
mid-2017 there are already abundant signs of counteroffensive from the (neo)
liberal core – the victory of Macron over Le Pen in France, the sincerely illiberal
yet profoundly inept Trump regime dying the death of a thousand cuts of in-

| Berliner Blätter | Heft 80-I / 2018 | S. 83–90

fighting and scandal – as well as a surging left populism that makes longer-term
diagnostics uncertain.
But 2016 and now 2017 have been revealing of the fragility of liberal exper-
tise in the face of its own failures and reinvigorated authoritarian and socialist
ideologies. In the United States, in the early days of shock and panic following
Trump’s victory, there was a remarkable degree of epistemic self-accusation
among liberal experts for their overreliance on polling data, on the opiate of anti-
Trump punditry, and for their disconnection with Rust Belt Erlebnisse (chronic
unemployment, deskilling, anti-immigrant and free trade sentiment, epidemic
addiction) that had somehow not been digested into the left-liberal campaign
knowledge and strategy. This ›soul-searching‹ was by no means limited to the
operative sphere of the Democratic Party but incorporated right-liberal ›inde-
pendents‹ and ›moderate Republicans‹ who were equally aghast at the appeal of
Trumpism. There seemed to be a genuine crisis of what Stefan Beck has termed
83
»authenticated expertise« – »an expertise that is impregnated with a certain au-
thenticity that – in the eyes of everybody involved – enhances the trustworthi-
ness and reliability of disseminated knowledges« (Beck 2015, 18).
The authenticity crisis pivoted on the revelation that the Erfahrungswelten
of left- and right-liberal expertise no longer resonated with the aspirations,
anxieties and miseries of the white non-urban American working class. During
the neoliberal heyday, this class had been cynically manipulated for decades
by right-liberal corporate interests while becoming an object of condescen-
sion and increasing contempt by a left-liberal urban elite. After Trump’s vic-
tory, books like Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in their Own Land (2016),
became immediate must-read texts for those who had experienced the Obama
presidency as the restoration of progressive liberalism, or at least competent lib-
eralism, after the economic collapse of 2008. The Democratic Party was thrown
into a disarray from which it has not yet recovered, torn between the New Left
Clintonism that won the popular vote and a left populism that continues to grow
in energy and purpose as the idea of a progressive mode of neoliberalism, so
popular in the 1990s and early 2000s, is steadily disenchanted.
But it is fair to say that self-recognition of a crisis of liberal authenticity has
been as shallow as it has been wide. Almost immediately after the shock wore
off, defensiveness and deflections became the order of the day. Blame quickly
shifted from the transparticular to the particular, for example to Clinton’s cam-
paign strategy, and its lack of on-the-ground investment in crucial Midwestern
states erroneously believed to be safely Democratic. Right-wing disinformation,
particularly the popularity of Fox News, was richly blamed for fostering illiberal
›alternative facts‹ and normalizing half- and counter-truths. Even the analytic
and predictive value of polling was quickly shored up, for example by meta-poll-
ing guru Nate Silver, who wrote in defense of the value of advanced data analyt-
ics for predicting elections. Silver credited his own website FiveThirtyEight for
having given Trump a relatively high chance of success, and concluded,

»We strongly disagree with the idea that there was a massive polling er-
ror. Instead, there was a modest polling error, well in line with historical
polling errors, but even a modest error was enough to provide for plenty
of paths to victory for Trump. We think people should have been bet-
ter prepared for it. There was widespread complacency about Clinton’s
chances in a way that wasn’t justified by a careful analysis of the data and
the uncertainties surrounding it.« (Silver 2016)

A more important and resilient displacement of liberal authenticity crisis has

been the ›stolen election‹ narrative in which the Trump campaign conspired
with agents of the Russian government and Wikileaks to release hacked emails
and other information unflattering to Clinton at key moments in the latter
days of the campaign. There are many variants on this narrative, some of them
awarding less agency to Russia and more to the poor judgment of the FBI Direc-
tor James Comey in releasing news of a reopened investigation into Clinton’s
emails just weeks before the election. Some variants award even more agency
to Russia however, arguing that Russian hackers were able to infiltrate voting
databases and even machines, while others report that a joint American and
Russian propaganda campaign overwhelmed social media with bots messag-
ing fake news, in particular aimed at encouraging Sanders supporters not to
vote.
Although it is quite possible that elements of these narratives will eventually
be corroborated, I am more interested in considering them as symptoms of the
anxious and fugitive character of liberal expertise. In this sense, little is more
revealing than the diagnostics that we are enduring a »post-truth« (named by
Oxford Dictionaries as 2016’s word of the year) condition. This condition – sum-
marized by one reporter as »the death of the belief in fact« (Cilizza 2016) – has
been the object of much worry and lament among both left- and right-liberals.
The root cause is normally attributed to technological shifts in ecologies and
practices of information and communication. The diversification of norms and
channels of mediation that began with the advent of cable and satellite broad-
casting in the 1980s and accelerated with the Internet in the 1990s and social
and mobile media in the 2000s is often named as culprit.

»The fragmentation of the media over the past decade has spawned doz-
ens of ideologically driven news sites, radio stations and cable TV out-
lets. That leads to a siloing effect in which a conservative only consumes
information that affirms their point of view. Ditto a liberal. You can go
through each day as a well(-ish)-informed person without ever hearing
a sliver of news that contradicts what you already believe.« (Ibid.)

| Dominic Boyer | Our post-post-truth condition

What is revealed in such statements is that the core issue of concern is not re-
ally the death of belief in fact or the absence of truth but rather the appearance
of competing parallel spheres of veridiction in which ideological engines of
truth-making radiate facts from normative institutional centers all the way into
conspiratorial fringe speculation on both ends of the political spectrum. Both
spheres eye each other malignantly with accusations of ›fake news‹ from the
right avidly matching those of ›post-truth‹ on the left. William Davies writes of
the »oversupply of facts in the 21st century« (2016), a crippling abundance that
strains our capacity to conjure »a reality that we can all agree on«. The post-truth
era, to be clear, is awash in truth; truth is literally hyperobjective (Morton 2013),
operating at a scale that challenges human knowing, the problem for liberalism
being principally that so much truth now inconveniently originates outside its
sphere of veridiction.
85
What post-truth diagnostics signal then is a shockwave passing through the
ecology of liberal expertise that we have at last circled back to our pre-1989 con-
dition of a multiplicity of political ideologies and ontologies competing with
one another to steer the future of world history. In 2010, Alexei Yurchak and I
published an essay, »American Stiob«, that addressed symptoms of ideologi-
cal crisis in late liberalism – overformalization, increasing self-referentiality, a
turn away from constative meaning and toward performative meaning – all of
which suggested a brewing authenticity crisis and unmooring of liberal ideol-
ogy from experiential reality. This is not to say that we saw the rise of illiberal-
ism coming so quickly any more than anyone else did. To paraphrase Alexei’s
(2004) study of the last Soviet generation, the collapse of neo/liberal end-of-
history universalism seemed unthinkable until it actually happened in 2016,
at which point it seemed retrospectively inevitable. As Kregg Hetherington has
insightfully written, today’s talk of descent into ›post-truth‹ should be viewed as
a return-of-the-repressed politics of veridiction that has been actively silenced
since the 1990s:

»[…T]he collapse of effective alternatives made it possible for many lib-

erals to genuinely believe that politics had ended, a version of it also op-
erates in continental Europe, where the opening of borders and unifica-
tion of currency (among other standards) were seen as flowing naturally
from the fall of the Berlin wall. So hegemonic had this conception of
politics become in the 1990s and 2000s that it rarely described itself with
direct reference to the ›truth‹. And this is what makes the declaration of
post-truth so revealing: it retroactively reveals the epistemological stakes
of a politics that had forgotten it was political.« (Hetherington 2017)

Recognition that liberalism was always veridictional, even at the height of its
powers, always one mode of truth-telling among others, is crucial to moving
past the forlorn hand-wringing of post-truthism. Whether one’s ambition is
simply to defeat illiberal populism and authoritarianism or to help enable new
institutions of progressive ecoliberalism, our post-post-truth condition should
involve some reverse engineering of Stefan Beck’s question, »How and through
which social, cultural and cognitive processes is experience gradually turned
into expertise?« (2015, 10). In his analytics, Beck stresses the distinction in Ger-
man between Erlebnis (existential experience) and Erfahrung (experiences
rationally reflected upon), which helpfully maps the disjuncture that blinded
(most) liberal expertise to the many miseries caused by neoliberal policy and
practice. We need to cultivate better Erfahrungen of the Erlebnisse that are pro-
pelling authoritarianism forward as well as to harness the Erlebnisse available to
us that will permit us to jam and rupture the surprisingly resilient signals emit-
ted by the petromodern neoliberal ecology of expertise.
As an example of the former practice, I would recommend an unusually insight-
ful analysis of the youth appeal of Trump published by comic writer Dale Beran
in February 2017. Beran retraces the origins of the skilled online mediators of
Trumpism back to the 4chan website and the anti-woman Gamergate move-
ment. But his argument is ultimately that the knowledge and aspirations offered
by politicians of the postwar generation like Clinton is wildly out of sync with a
millennial precariat that came of age in the era of neoliberal globalization, digi-
talization and automation and whose emotional safety net is, to quote Henry
Rollins, »drugs, alcohol, cheap food and free porn« (2017).

»In the first presidential debate, Hillary evoked her conservative father
as a way of appealing to the electorate, ›My father was a small busi-
nessman‹. she said. ›He worked really hard  … And so what I believe
is the more we can do for the middle class, the more we can invest in
you …‹
No one noted how wildly outdated Clinton’s picture of the average voter
was (her father, a suburban business man in the 50s) because we are
used to every politician holding up the same faded 65-year-old snapshot
anytime he or she regards the American electorate. Just like how images
of Christmas on Coke bottles and catalogs are forever stuck in the 30s
and 40s, so we expect politics to be eternally frozen in the 1950s. That
is to say, as a nation still (somehow!) defined by its baby boomers, we
understand this era as the baseline for understanding ourselves, consid-
ering it, ›where we are from‹.
But what does the American electorate look like if we put down the snap-
shot? Peel away how we perceive ourselves from what we actually are?
How has that image of a 1950s businessman who owns his own home in
the suburbs changed after decades of declines in wages, middle class-

| Dominic Boyer | Our post-post-truth condition

dom, and home ownership?
To younger generations who never had such jobs, who had only the my-
thology of such jobs (rather a whimsical snapshot of the 1950s frozen in
time by America’s ideology), this part of the narrative is clear. America,
and perhaps existence itself is a cascade of empty promises and adver-
tisements – that is to say, fantasy worlds, expectations that will never be
realized ›IRL‹, but perhaps consumed briefly in small snatches of com-
modified pleasure.
Thus these Trump supporters hold a different sort of ideology, not one
of ›when will my horse come in‹, but a trolling self-effacing, ›I know my
horse will never come in‹. That is to say, younger Trump supporters
know they are handing their money to someone who will never place
their bets – only his own – because, after all, it’s plain as day there was
never any other option.« (Beran 2017)
87
Beran is certainly not blaming Trump’s victory on the millennial generation
(and this is borne out in exit polls from the general election); he is instead trying
to pinpoint how and why a millennial (and GenX) minority – still an important
minority that brings a great deal of media creativity and tenacity to Trumpism –
formed its perplexing bond with the Republican candidate.

»4chan’s value system, like Trump’s ideology, is obsessed with mascu-

line competition (and the subsequent humiliation when the compe-
tition is lost). Note the terms 4chan invented, now so popular among
grade schoolers everywhere: ›fail‹ and ›win‹, ›alpha‹ males and ›beta
cucks‹. This system is defined by its childlike innocence, that is to say,
the inventor’s inexperience with any sort of ›IRL‹ romantic interaction.
And like Trump, since these men wear their insecurities on their sleeve,
they fling these insults in wild rabid bursts at everyone else.
Trump the loser, the outsider, the hot mess, the pathetic joke, embodies
this duality. Trump represents both the alpha and the beta. He is a suc-
cessful person who, as the left often notes, is also the exact opposite – a
grotesque loser, sensitive and prideful about his outsider status, ready at
the drop of a hat to go on the attack, self-obsessed, selfish, abrogating,
unquestioning of his own mansplaining and spreading, so insecure he
must assault women. In other words, to paraphrase Truman Capote, he
is someone with his nose pressed so hard up against the glass he looks
ridiculous. And for this reason, (because he knows he is substanceless)
he must constantly re-affirm his own ego. Or as Errol Morris put it, quot-
ing Borges, he is a ›labyrinth with no center‹.
But, what the left doesn’t realize is, this is not a problem for Trump’s sup-
porters, rather, the reason why they support him.
Trump supporters voted for the con-man, the labyrinth with no center,
because the labyrinth with no center is how they feel, how they feel the
world works around them.« (Ibid.)

The most crippling revelation Beran offers to believers in liberal renaissance is

that »the left should stop expecting Trump’s supporters to be upset when he
doesn’t fulfill his promises. Support for Trump is an acknowledgement that
the promise is empty.« (Ibid.) Indeed, the first six months of Trump’s presi-
dency have seen countless instances of corruption, deceit and incompetence,
fulfilling the worst expectations of his left and right liberal critics but mak-
ing no discernable impact on the enthusiasm of his political base. For Beran,
at least some of those who support Trump do so as »a defiant expression of
despair« (ibid.), not because they expect him to do anything more than of-
fer cheap entertainment. A large portion of that entertainment appears to be
how successfully Trump trolls liberals and anyone else who seems earnestly
invested in political norms, communication, promises, institutions, and re-
sponsibilities.
Liberal and socialist sanctimony will have little purchase on the Erlebnisse
and »ordinary affects« (Stewart 2007) of Trump’s supporters. Although that
is no reason not to speak and act against the histories of gendered, colonial
and racial violence that have amply informed contemporary illiberalism and
whose miseries it seeks to perpetuate. Rather it seems to me that what is
needed is the laying down of new affective grooves that balance compassion
for the victims of neoliberalism across the political spectrum with an unapol-
ogetically angry desire for revolutionary infrastructures (Boyer 2018) aimed
at breaking the androleukoheteropetromodern trajectory of the Anthropo-
cene. What is needed is thus something more complicated and daunting than
a return to the truths, norms and institutions of 20th century liberalism. The
relevant project is actually civilizational transformation, with the hope that
the ecology of political expertise that accompanies it will not be restricted to
northern state-centered political ontologies and epistemics. We should ex-
pect, along with Beck, that new Erlebnisse will be capable of sparking new
Erfahrungen.

Bibliography

Beck, Stefan (2015): The Problem of Expertise. From Experience to Skillful Practices to Ex-
pertise. Ecological and Pragmatist Perspectives. In: European Journal of Pragmatism
and American Philosophy VII/1, 8-23.
Beran, Dale (2017): 4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump. https://medium.com
/@DaleBeran/4chan-the-skeleton-key-to-the-rise-of-trump-624e7cb798cb, last ac-
cessed 17.07.2018.

| Dominic Boyer | Our post-post-truth condition

Boyer, Dominic (2018): Revolutionary Infrastructure. In: Penny Harvey et al. (Eds.): Infra-
structures and Social Complexity. London, 174-186.
Boyer, Dominic/Alexei Yurchak (2010): American Stiob: Or, What Late-Socialist Aesthet-
ics of Parody Reveal about Contemporary Political Culture in the West. In: Cultural An-
thropology 25/2, 179-221.
Cilizza, Chris (2016): Donald Trump’s post-truth campaign and what it says about the dis-
mal state of US politics. In: The Independent, 10.5.2016. [Online Version]. https://www.
independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-campaign-republican-us-
election-2016-what-it-says-about-a7022276.html, last accessed 17.07.2018.
Davies, William (2016): The Age of Post-Truth Politics. In: New York Times, 24.8.2016. [On-
line Version]. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/24/opinion/campaign-stops/the-
age-of-post-truth-politics.html, last accessed 17.07.2018.
Hetherington, Kregg (2017): What came before Post-Truth? In: EASST Review 36/2.
https://easst.net/article/what-came-before-post-truth/, last accessed 17.07.2018.
Hochschild, Arlie Russell (2016): Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on
the American Right. New York.
Morton, Timothy (2013): Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the
World. Minneapolis.
89
Rollins, Henry (2017): Henry Rollins: America’s Real Safety Net Is Drugs, Alcohol, Cheap
Food and Free Porn. In: LA Weekly, 6.7.2017. [Online Version]. http://www.laweekly.
com/music/henry-rollins-americas-real-safety-net-is-drugs-alcohol-cheap-food-
and-free-porn-8392156, last accessed 17.07.2018.
Silver, Nate (2016): Why FiveThirtyEight Gave Trump A Better Chance Than Almost Any-
one Else. http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-fivethirtyeight-gave-trump-a-better-
chance-than-almost-anyone-else/, last accessed 17.07.2018.
Stewart, Kathleen (2007): Ordinary Affects. Durham.
Yurchak, Alexei (2004): Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet
Generation. Princeton.