Political Pedagogy in the Post-Truth Era: With Lyotard and Lecercle

• In Event: Critical Education and Philosophy in a Post-Truth World

Abstract

Many are in shock that today in politics truth doesn’t seem to matter. This analysis misses the mark: politics was never about a correspondence with an existing truth, but about the formulation of a new truth. The contemporary moment thus offers up an important opportunity to reclaim the nature of the political, to develop new political positions on that basis and, most importantly, to assert those politics. This is a deeply pedagogical task, but it is one to which critical forms of education aren’t suited. Critical education is really good at denouncing the present moment. There is no shortage of articles and blog posts condemning our political scene in near apocalyptic terms. At best, these writings end with a vague call for action. This is not sufficient. Those of us in education who want to fight for a better world need to move from critique to politics, from politics to movement. It is to this end that I offer this paper, in which I diagnose our present moment of the “post-truth” and propose a way out: a pedagogy of clarity, imagination, organization, and force. The task is not to return to some “truth era,” but to organize in order to vindicate a new truth, a just truth.
The paper begins by describing the relationship between the post-truth and the truth as analgous to the relationship between the post-modern and the modern. For Lytoard, the postmodern isn’t a negation, annihilation, or supersession of the modern. The post-modern doesn’t come after the modern but rather permanently inhabits it, opens up ellipses within it. Thus, the post-truth era presents us with a revolutionary opportunity, one that we forefeit if we insist that the role of education is to transmit the truth. Next, I turn to Lecerle’s Marxist philosophy of language, to argue that the value of statements isn’t their truth or even their ability to reflect a situation accurately, but rather their ability to name a conflict in a way that can, in the future and with struggle, be vindicated (which depends on a host of factors, of course).

References:

Backer, D. (2016). Toward an activist theory of language. In J. Hannon (Ed.), Truth in the public sphere. Lanham: Lexington, 3-22.
Lukács, G. (1924/2009). Lenin: A study on the unity of his thought. London and New York: Verso.
Lyotard, J-F. (1992). The postmodern explained: Correspondence 1982-1985. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Lyotard, J-F. (1997). Postmodern fables, trans. by G.V.D. Abbeele. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Author

• Derek R. Ford, DePauw University