Approaches On Reality And Truth In The Post-Truth Era

What real is, what reality is and what the shape of them are important notions to understand how they are represented in visuality. In this sense, describing has a crucial role to design world through ideologies, which also stem from sociological developments. Media has an ability to describe and shape reality and truth due to its power. Also, media has a power to affect sociological, political and economic movements and relationships by using a visual narrative.

Firstly, the concepts of truth and reality are identical with the existence of human beings because human beings have always been in search of meaning. Also, their thoughts and actions have been shaped for this purpose. There are many definitions of truth and reality in the literature. However, there is a fundamental difference between the two concepts in the philosophical and sociological context. It is possible to explain this difference as follows: Reality refers to objective reality, and truth refers to the reflection of this objective reality in the mind. Truth is not the reality itself, yet is a reflection of reality and truth expresses the relevance between thought and object. According to Guy Debord, the truth can be created in a systematic way. The systematic creation and reproduction of truth is a manifestation of great power and influence on societies in a sociological context. Therefore, the connection between the concepts of truth and reality should be analyzed carefully and the effects and reflections of these concepts on social institutions (state, family, education, religion, law…) and their functions (providing social control, socialization, solidarity…) should be examined.

Based on the definitions of truth and reality, we encounter a new concept in analyzing today's social movements and social changes: Post-truth. The concept of post-truth, which was defined as the fact that objective truths were less effective than emotions and personal convictions in determining public opinion on a certain subject and which was firstly published in Serbian journalist Steve Tesich's The Nation in 1992. With the selection of the word of the year by the Oxford Dictionary, the term of post-truth’s importance gradually increases and becomes one of the concepts that should be examined. In order to make sense of this concept, it is necessary to first explain the concepts of post-modernism and post-structuralism, because we see the effects of these concepts both in the academic literature and in the construction of social. Post-modernism can be considered as the denial of modernism, rationality, which is one of the basic concepts of modernism, and the philosophy of epistemology. Instead of determination in modernism, uncertainty has become one of the most fundamental features of post-modern thought. In addition to this, post-modernism proposes that there is no absolute reality behind things. According to Ziauddin Serdar, we see only what we want to see, that our position in time and space allows us and that our cultural and historical perceptions are focused. Another principle that post-modernism will present in addressing the issue of alienation in the post-truth era is the world lost between the image and the material reality, instead of the reality we now have. In this case, one cannot speak of reality. All social life is under the control of imitations, models, pure images and representations, not facts. At this point, the position of knowledge in post-modern time and the post-truth era should also be examined. As Jean François Lyotard states in the “Postmodern Situation”, the basic criterion that determines the post-modern situation is the position of knowledge and a new understanding of knowledge is now valid in the post-modern situation. It is seen that information is produced and consumed for the sale of information in the post-modern era. Knowledge is no longer a goal in itself and is no longer worthwhile. In a sense, the commodification of information is encountered.

Post-structuralism, which was influenced greatly by post-modernism, anti-humanism, rejection of enlightenment and existential phenomenology and including representatives of Jean Baudrillard, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Julia Kristeva, implies that history and culture shapes constructions, thus structures are subject to misinterpretations and prejudices. Therefore, in order to understand an object, both the object itself and the information systems that produce it must be examined together. Based on this understanding, we can say that post-structuralism accepts how knowledge is produced as basic research problematic. Post-structuralism, unlike structuralism, is historical; they focus on how cultural concepts change over time and try to find out what is now understood from the same concepts, and they approach history relatively. They reject the thesis that history evolves on an evolutionary line and claim that it is based on random phenomena. According to post-structuralists, history offers different options.

Additionally, according to Jean Baudrillard, who is interested in the concepts of representation, sign, the reality in his works and who takes a post-structuralist and post-modernist stance in his sociological evaluations, the meaning attributed to reality has changed with the prefix “Post” and a mental break has emerged between reality and sign. The effects of this fracture have been influenced by many of the ideological apparatuses of the state, especially the media. Dialectically, the media has been affected by this situation, yet it has become a mechanism of influence that drives social institutions, events and changes by reproducing truth in a way that is far from objectivity and reproducing reality in line with its interests. Thus, the media gained a dialectical meaning and went one step further than the traditional power of the media, taking control of today's societies under the “reality” halo. According to Baudrillard, the media see producing meaning as an imperative of morality. It emphasizes that it feels a moral responsibility to raise the cultural level of the masses by giving better news. However, the masses resist this because they want a demonstration, not a meaning. Also, the masses are convinced of all the content and they deny the dialectic of meaning, provided that there is a demonstration in the messages. Therefore, the aim of the study is to analyze the concepts of truth and reality and to adopt the results obtained to the study of alienation through visual studies in the post-truth era.

In the age of post-truth, truth and the data of truth do not produce objective results and this situation creates a simulation. According to Baudrillard, simulation is also the state of not having all the data of reality, which is not real. Thus, reality has been lost in this period. Images are the task of completing the lost reality. Reality has been reconstructed through these images, and this reality has been reconstructed and provides indications confirmed by the guarantee of “reality”. The indicators are their realities and the only reality that people can talk about by virtue of this situation, the indicators and the fictional reality need to be analyzed. From a visual sociological point of view, images are transformed into social reality through social practice in the process of their production, reading, and distribution. In this context, sociologist and photographer Douglas Harper argues that the visual representation of reality (the world photographed, painted, reproduced or otherwise visually encountered) is socially constructed and that the idea of seeing, it socially constitutes the essence of visual sociology. In the post-truth era, the power of visual expression has reached an undeniable level, and visual values are being reproduced and equipped with new values.

Alienation is one of the other concepts that should be examined within this framework. Due to the nature of the concept of post-truth (the fact that truth is less effective than emotions and personal convictions), it is inevitable that individuals and societies are exposed to alienation. An important thinker, Karl Marx, who first developed alienation in his early works and placed this theory at the center of all his economic writing, sees the concept of labor as the foundation of history and society, which is fundamental to every aspect of human existence, and the object of the product produced by labor, namely the product of labor itself. He defines alienation as the presence of labor. The concept of alienation is not only addressed through labor but also causes the deterioration of relations between these concepts and the othering of the subject, taking into account the relationship between subject and object and the relationship between consciousness and things.

On the other, Jacques Lacan, who is a philosopher and a psychoanalyst, known for the notions of alienation and the other, offers a different perspective for alienation and image and states alienation as a prerequisite of subjectivity. The psychoanalytic implications we have obtained from Lacan, provide a more comprehensive field of study on the other and alienation in the post-truth era. According to him, other is gained an identity from desires, passions, ideals, god, the state by law. In particular, it is possible to produce meanings through images, to understand the “other” from the Lacanian point of view and to examine the visual construction process of alienation.

Furthermore, Lacan gives us a perspective to illustrate reality, which we need to understand, that reality has a connection with symbolic, that is also an expression of the lack, which is both an output and an input of desires. I want to emphasize the reciprocity between an output and an input of desires because when we have a desire for something new, we create a new lack that needs to be satisfied. Thus, there is a dialectical reformation of desires and gaps. Owing to this dialectical reformation, we will always have conflicts in our identities which are also shaped and constructed on a controversial base. In this sense, reality and imagination should be analysed because both of them have a connection with the reciprocal relationship between desire and lack, also they are substantially based on a confliction. When reality occurs, the imaginary takes shape as a response to reality. The reality in itself has a reestablished nature which causes a re-production and re-shaping of the real. Following the construction of the real, alienation is going to be an inextricable part of the identity. In addition to this, false consciousness is consecutively going to merge with alienation to their own subjects.

The images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished. Reality considered partially unfolds, in its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation. The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself. Guy Debord

In addition to them, “reification” is the key notion to make the system approvable because people need to believe in terms when they are sensible and even embodied. In this conjuncture, photography for Susan Sontag, in fact, is a social ritual, a defence screen against concerns and a means of exhibiting power. The feature of being a social ritual of photography is both a means to analyse society and a means to reveal reality from an aesthetic perspective. This reciprocal relationship between analysing society and having an aesthetic perspective brings to the power of interpretation. Moreover, being a means of exhibiting power can be a form of resistance in a dichotomous perspective. Power and resistance cannot exist without one of them because both of them exist in a controversial base. Confliction is the base of every system such as politics, economics, sociological and so on. Also, conflictions can be shown as a means of exhibiting power. In this sense, colour is one of the tools for supporting the effect of resistance and makes the power of resistance more conspicuous from a photographic perspective. Hence, photography brings the power to reveal truth and reality from a different perspective. Also, photography has the power to transform reality and truth by using a visual expression. Therefore, the reversal and paradoxical relationship amongst resistance, reality, truth and transformation gives us gaze on the imaginary system.

Throughout the articulations of reality, focusing on cuts, which symbolizes splits between reality and truth also splits between resistance and transformation. As I mentioned on alienation and false conscious before, these cuts are inseparable parts of alienation and false consciousness. The cuts are crucial to illustrate the form of reality and the form of truth in a representing way.

To sum up, ironically the term of “jouissance”, which means an excess of life and used by Lacan to describe the impossibility for being satisfied, can symbolizes the effects of visuality because of the essence of the pleasure of visual in a reciprocal perspective. Visuals will always give us a perspective about things but they cannot never be distinct. There should be studies on visual because visual can make alienation stronger from a sociological perspective. Furthermore, having awareness about being and becoming is important to shape our lives likewise, enlightenment of being and becoming is eventually going to be a resistance to alienation in the post-truth era.

Didem Yilmaz