Steve Fuller. Post-Truth: Knowledge as a Power Game; New York: Anthem Press; 218 pages; paperback $39.95; ISBN: 978-1-78308-694-8
by Steve Baxi
A consistent problem in the journalistic discourse on post-truth is the confusion between the recent phenomenon of post-truth and some historically justifiable, apolitical, entirely objective Truth – the latter having been, on some level, eclipsed by the former. Indeed, this is precisely how the Oxford English Dictionary understands post-truth, and thus the focus in mainstream media outlets and contemporary studies of truth have focused on the contentions between Truth and post-truth. However, this understanding misses the relationships of power and conditions of possibility for knowledge with respect to truth – power relations and conditions we can claim to value in research fields that place the pursuit of truth over the recent, overblown idea of Truth.
In the face of academic experts, Brexit, and social media, Steve Fuller argues that post-truth is “a deep feature of at least Western intellectual life, bringing together issues of politics, science and judgement in ways which established authorities have traditionally wished to be separate” (2018, 6). Fuller’s Post-Truth: Knowledge as a Power Game attempts to provide a set of case studies of post-truth in academia, as well as in contemporary political movements, to establish the historical character of post-truth, or what he calls a post-truth history of post-truth.
The book is divided into seven chapters, each examining Fuller’s own previously developed concepts and social epistemological stances on expertise, philosophy, sociology, and science and technology studies. Fuller especially draws on Vilfredo Pareto’s distinction between “lions” and “foxes” to help set up the tensions in his case studies. Where the lions play by the rules of the game, the foxes attempt to change the rules, but do so such that the lions believe themselves to be following the very same rules they have always followed. Fuller’s approach here is loosely genealogical, perhaps even Foucauldian, as he attempts to, at least initially, present us with a history of the present.
Two lions snarling at each other. Colour process print after Sakai Hōitsu. CC BY.Credit: Wellcome Collection
While Fuller coins various concepts, the most important appears to be modal power which he defines as “control over what can be true or false, which is reflected in institutions about what is possible, impossible, necessary and contingent” (2018, 188). Modal power mirrors the historical discourse on systems of exclusion, the most powerful of which is the will to know, here reconfigured to be part of the military-industrial will to know (more on this below). This form of power is intended not only to explain how the moves of the “lions” and “foxes” become possible, but also how the academic fields they inhabit are growing, changing, accepting or now rejecting certain paradigms of truth.
While commentary on post-truth’s relationship to Brexit and the 2016 US presidential election has largely understood post-truth as a rejection of the facts, Fuller provides a more complex account. He asks: if these events are the outcome of a certain discourse of rules, where were these rules crafted? How might we even think of Plato, in one of Fuller’s most provocative statements, as the original post-truth philosopher? And how does this change our view of the present? Fuller especially analyses Brexit via his long-standing anti-expertise approach to social epistemology. This allows him to read Brexit as a phenomenon incited by parliamentary elites distinct from the ethical values and strategies identified in wider public opinion. Fuller concludes from this a resurgence of a “general will” in democracy. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s general will represents a sense of shared identity: to challenge me is not merely to challenge my opinion, but the very identity I share in, and the traditions I identify with. In the case of Brexit, this is how people come to rally around nationhood. In the case of academia, it is seen in the hard-lined alignment with unchanging paradigms of thought, where the act of placing a footnote is a way of counting yourself amongst a group with a political identity. Fuller asks where this growing predilection for academic politics came from. He thus dovetails into a genealogy of academic philosophy
Academics, Fuller argues, while claiming to be in pursuit of truth, or what Michel Foucault (borrowing from Nietzsche) would call savoir, have in fact, since Plato, been entrenched in what is only now referred to as Post-Truth.[ref] Foucault, Michel. “Appendix: The Discourse on Language.” The Archaeology of Knowledge, 220. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Vintage Books, 2010. 215-237.[/ref] This claim is tried into Fuller’s concept of modal power, which is an account of how, collectively, any discourse becomes a discourse in the first place; post-truth is then an argument about the boundaries of discourse. Academic fields such as sociology are important because they are acutely aware of what counts as possible in terms of boundary-pushing. Where sociology had historically embraced the post-truth condition, with its analysis of how subjectivity evolves within a particular historical condition, its contemporary pursuit of a style of knowledge-making modelled on the rigid sciences fails to adequately challenge post-truth.
If post-truth and truth are separated by who decides to change the rules of the game or who follows them, sociology ought to be at some advantage. And yet sociology – and academia more widely – seems unable to confront these issues. To explain this, Fuller coins the term “military-industrial will to knowledge,” which exemplifies the pursuit of knowledge as “effective” or useful. Fuller diagnoses academia as frequently degenerating into conversations about the merits of certain principles without first identifying itself as part of the institutions of modal power. Here, we see how goal-oriented publications, writing, or knowledge-development relates to whether one follows the rules, or changes them: i.e. whether one is a “fox” or a “lion.” A military-industrial will to know empowers certain paradigms of thought, and thus the lions are those safeguarding an unyielding sense of academic identity; the foxes are those who would challenge these norms, but the “publish or die” state of academic positions make such self-aware shifts near impossible.
Even living outside these academic norms will not necessarily solve the problem. Fuller develops the concept of ‘protscience’ to describe how individuals come to be accustomed to understandings of science. Even deviations from institutional norms still produce their own kinds of norms which are often just as dangerous and which play into the post-truth condition. Protscience most directly threads Fuller’s discussion of Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn into his more immediate interest in academia. By pulling in the philosophy of science, we begin to see how philosophy and science are not so distinct. If we take post-truth to be about how the rules change, science as the understanding of rules, and politics as their possibility via modal power, then these three “vocations” ultimately coincide with one another. Here, Fuller delivers on the fundamental premise of this text: that post-truth represents a collapse of traditional academic spheres into each other. To do philosophy is to do science; to do science is to do politics; to do politics is to do philosophy.
In general, Post-Truth is an insightful, thorough text which examines issues of truth with more nuance and clarity than most other recent works in the field. The book succeeds most overtly in its ability to present a case for why post-truth studies need be done. To understand the contemporary world, the promises of past theories, and where things go wrong in political controversy, we have to understand how post-truth in its contemporary condition unites all fields of inquiry. In this way, Fuller seems to owe much to John Dewey’s and Arthur Danto’s arguments that a solution to one problem implies a solution to all problems.[ref] Danto, Arthur C. Nietzsche as Philosopher, 24. New York: Columbia University Press, 1965 [/ref]
However, what Post-Truth lacks is a convincing case for its own need to present concepts and coinages that might go without a label. Despite a deep reading of the text, and research on Fuller’s past work, I am still unclear on why modal power is somehow different, necessary or even more precise a quantifier of power. In general, the post-Foucauldian world of academia, and certainly the audience that Fuller wishes to speak to, will be keenly aware of what we mean when we discuss the conditions for the possibility of certain concepts. Power on its own dictates an all-inclusive concept that unities the various fields that Fuller discusses, in a way that seems not to gain much by adding ‘modal’ to it.
Similarly, Fuller frequently draws on his own body of work, which wrestles with these themes of anti-institutionalism, elitism, and gate keeping.[ref]This is evident most clearly in Fuller, Steve. Social Epistemology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. And Fuller, Steve. The Intellectual. Cambridge, UK: Icon, 2005.[/ref] But he does so without providing us any reason to see him as one of us, outside the world of academics as we wage a war of foxes and lions on the ground. Military Industrial Will to Knowledge has quite a ring to it, as does modal power, but these concepts sometimes sound more like the academic stiffness Fuller claims to detest, and less like the tools with which we might interrogate the various values of our post-truth society.
Steve Baxi is a Graduate Student and Teaching Assistant in the Ethics and Applied Philosophy Department at the University of the North Carolina at Charlotte. He works across philosophical traditions, with a particular interest in Nietzsche and Foucault. He is currently writing on the politics of truth, and social media ethics.