Written by: Justin Williams-owner of Taino Studios
Art in the Post-Truth Condition The contemporary problem of post-truth is not simply that people lie or that misinformation circulates more rapidly than it once did. Rather, post-truth describes a cultural condition in which emotional identification, narrative, and aesthetic experience can become more persuasive than objective evidence. James Corby argues in “The Post-Literary, Post-Truth, and Modernity” that contemporary post-truth culture belongs to a much longer philosophical history concerning the relationship among truth, representation, subjectivity, and aesthetics. From Plato’s suspicion of mimesis through Kant’s turn toward subjective aesthetic judgment and Romanticism’s elevation of artistic world-making, Western thought has repeatedly confronted art’s ability to shape how reality is perceived.
In the contemporary media environment, this ability has expanded beyond art into politics, advertising, cinema, and social media. Performativity and visual art can react to this state not by trying to return to the false opposition between the true and the fictitious, but by revealing how the former is created, staged, distributed, and felt. Through disrupting rather than completing stories, art can create an awareness in people about their own role in the process of signification. In this sense, effective performative art can function as what Corby calls a “countertext”: it can use mimesis, affect, myth, and aesthetic experience while resisting the ideological closure through which those same forces become unquestionable truths. Corby’s argument suggests that post-truth must first be understood as an aesthetic problem. What distinguishes the contemporary condition is not necessarily the existence of dishonest political actors, but the willingness of audiences to accept falsehoods when those falsehoods participate in emotionally satisfying narratives. Corby discusses the ability of technologically facilitated echo chambers to reinforce stories that correspond to tribal identity, grievance, and emotional desire. Within this environment, “lies and half-truths” become effective when embedded within stories capable of generating emotional responses (Corby 43). Post-truth therefore does not merely ask an audience to accept inaccurate information. It creates narratives through which information becomes emotionally meaningful.
Artists face a big challenge because they use similar tools like images, stories, emotions, and performances. They can't just create art that shows the truth and expect it to fix the problem of post-truth culture. If post-truth is already using aesthetics to persuade people, then creating a more convincing image might just repeat the same process that made the original idea persuasive.Instead, the main problem is how this image creates a false impression of its authenticity among people. It is a crucial question, as understanding how images affect people and make them perceive them as authentic ones allows artists to consider how they should design artworks that would oppose post-truth culture more effectively. In other words, examining how images are being used in order to create the illusion of their authenticity, artists will be able to create new strategies for developing artworks that would promote critical thinking and media literacy among people. This issue has been around for a lot longer than we think.
It actually starts with Plato, who was suspicious of things that imitate reality. For Plato, poetry was a problem because it could copy things so well. But Corby points out that Plato's idea of imitation goes beyond just simple copying. It's not just about words, but also about sounds, gestures, clothes, music, and rhythm - all these things can be used to create a performance that's very convincing. If we look at it from a modern perspective, Plato's idea of imitation is actually pretty similar to what we see in multimedia today. Think about it - political rallies, ads, movies, social media videos, and digital images can all create a kind of fake reality. They don't just give us information, they make us feel like we're experiencing something real. When we think about truth, we have to consider how pleasure plays a role. Plato was worried about this because he knew that people who can imitate things in many different ways can create representations that are very enjoyable, but not necessarily truthful. This is still a problem in terms of the media we consume nowadays. People tend not to trust something that is really happening around them, but only those things which resonate with their fears, aspirations, and identity. Art could assist us in understanding how representations are built in the first place. Rather than taking the images for granted and believing them as reality, art could make us question: why do I believe this? In a way, it would be like looking at the mirror of our perception. Through it, we would gain the understanding of the mechanisms of representation and its influences on our beliefs. In our time of representations, which are pleasant and reassuring, but do not always show the truth, art could help us to comprehend the issue.
Kant turns everything upside down in regards to our understanding of the representation and truth. He says that in most cases, the role of the observer and the person who is perceiving something is very strong in terms of defining what is real. As Corby states, one of the key problems in Kant's philosophy is: How much of our experience is due to the external world and how much to the internal workings of our mind?This is especially important when we talk about beauty. As Kant claims, the concept of beauty is not only an element within an object but also an event that occurs in a person's mind when he/she evaluates the object. Making a judgment about the beauty of something means not only considering the truth but also making someone else acknowledge this truth as well. As Corby says, quoting Fiona Hughes, this creates a "sociable dimension" to how we think about beauty. What this means is that our individual experiences of beauty can actually bring people together and create a sense of community. Modern digital culture enhances this connection. Likes, re-posts, memes, viral videos, fandoms, and political slogans can make an individual experience turn into something community-like. Algorithmic culture might even be understood as technologically amplifying the social dimension of aesthetic judgment: I feel this; people like me feel this; therefore this describes reality. The subjective experience acquires the appearance of collective truth. Yet Kantian aesthetics also provides a possible means of resistance. The sublime, in particular, can be understood as an encounter with something that cannot be easily contained by representation. Corby notes that Kantian aesthetic experience creates a space in which the possibilities of knowing and acting become perceptible without necessarily determining the world completely (51-52). This provides a useful model for performative art in the post-truth condition. Instead of offering another perfectly coherent explanation of reality, art can produce ambiguity, contradiction, difficulty, and incompletion. Post-truth ideology often succeeds because it closes interpretation: it provides an emotionally satisfying explanation of the world. A critical artwork can instead refuse that closure. Indeed, the use of the concepts formulated by Kant within the Romantic tradition is crucial for understanding of aesthetics. As Corby writes, the emphasis on an individual's ability to create and interpret his/her own reality emerged after Kant. Myths become useful tools for defining the identity of the community, explaining the causes of its suffering, setting up values and envisioning the future. But there's a problem when this way of creating a world through aesthetics becomes too powerful. Corby talks about how Carl Schmitt criticized Romanticism for taking aesthetic experience too far - it's not just about art anymore, but also about religion, politics, nations, history, and everything else. Indeed, the use of the concepts formulated by Kant within the Romantic tradition is crucial for understanding of aesthetics. As Corby writes, the emphasis on an individual's ability to create and interpret his/her own reality emerged after Kant. Myths become useful tools for defining the identity of the community, explaining the causes of its suffering, setting up values and envisioning the future.
Just about anything can be turned into something to watch or read - wars, deaths, who we are, protests, and even fighting back. Politics has become something like a performance, theater, or fiction. Here, the concept of the post-literary by Corby is quite useful because it's not just about the construction of our world through literature and art. It's more about social and political organization of our reality. We live in an era where the boundaries between reality and fiction have been blurring. The whole thing has become entertainment, thus influencing the way we understand politics and our existence. Modern artists don't need to abandon the emotional side of their creation, the narrative, beauty, and even imitation of reality just because it can be used for manipulation purposes. What they can do is to reveal the mechanisms of that manipulation. The case in point is the artwork of Arthur Jafa called Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death. It's a really emotional experience, with sound and images, that's made by putting together and juxtaposing pictures of Black American life that he found. The thing is, it doesn't try to make you think you're seeing reality exactly as it is. The editing, music, rhythm, and how the images are repeated and put together are all crucial to how it feels. When you're watching it, you're not just looking at a collection of pictures - you're seeing how those pictures get their emotional and cultural meaning. Hito Steyerl similarly interrogates the authority of contemporary images by examining digital circulation, surveillance, technological mediation, and image quality. Rather than asking audiences to place greater faith in visual representation, her practice makes the conditions under which images acquire power increasingly visible. Carrie Mae Weems likewise demonstrates how the relationship between photographic images and language can destabilize assumptions about photographic truth. Text, framing, sequencing, and context influence what an image appears capable of saying. In each case, the artist does not simply provide a better representation of reality. The artwork exposes representation itself as a constructed process.
When we think about how stories are told, we have to consider the idea of a "countertext". This theory, formulated by Corby, implies that certain forms of literature and art refuse the notion of being associated with a particular political agenda. These forms of art and literature retain their incompleteness and openness to interpretation and refuse to be defined as something belonging to one point of view. Corby's theory has been formulated under the influence of the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, who stated that the nature of true literature lies in its incompleteness and inability to be comprehended. Literature that is too political loses its meaning and becomes "post-literature". But if it can resist this temptation, it can become something more interesting - a "countertext" that challenges our assumptions and encourages us to think critically. This idea isn't just limited to literature, though - it can also apply to visual and performance art. The countertextual art form does not aim at telling us what to believe, but rather it invites us to interrogate how realities are constructed, including that of the artwork in question. The goal here is to reflect more on ourselves and the world around us. Through the study of the process through which realities are created, we get a better understanding of the various processes that affect our perceptions and beliefs about the world and the people in it. Corby ultimately describes the post-literary as a threefold crisis: a crisis of objectivity for philosophy, a crisis caused by literature’s collapse into ideology, and a political crisis in which society inhabits an “undifferentiated field of emotionally-charged doxa” without an obvious shared method for reasoning among competing positions (65). Performative art cannot solve this crisis simply by returning audiences to an idealized Enlightenment rationalism. Neither should it surrender completely to Romantic world-building. Its political potential instead lies in interruption. Performative art can interrupt the image, the narrative, the spectacle, and the certainty through which post-truth becomes persuasive. More importantly, it can interrupt itself by acknowledging its own processes of construction. The most politically responsible artwork in the post-truth condition may therefore be one that refuses to become a complete world.Instead of substituting one mythology for another, performance art could demonstrate the mechanism that makes worlds convincing. This kind of art is not asking the audience to believe something else but to recognize the process of believing.
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