An epistemic shift is a prerequisite to fiated impacts

Farkas and Schou argue that what is presently needed is ‘another way of understanding both the democratic tradition as well as politics and the political’ (2020: 142). Clearly, this task is both conceptual and normative. It is conceptual insofar as it requires us to create other vocabularies than those currently structuring post-truth worlds. To grasp the dynamics of politics, we need to move beyond existing premises. Doing so is, however, also an imminently normative endeavor, on two accounts. First, because it asks us—as people currently inhabiting post-truth worlds—to think and act differently. We are prompted to rethink what we are doing. Second, proposing a shift in our existing ideas of politics and the political is also normative in the sense that it can pave the way for other modes of doing politics and democracy in the future. If we shift how we think through questions of politics, then we will also come to see that the status quo does not suffice. (Farkas and Schou 2020: 142) Their ardent call for ‘the formulation of proper alternatives’ (Farkas and Schou 2020: 157) seems to, however, overlook the fact that social theorists have been proposing such alternatives for a very long time. Indeed, one does not need to look hard to find a plethora of alternative visions of the future (see, for instance, Gorz 1983). Hence, as much as I endorse the sentiments underpinning Farkas and Schou’s stance, I nevertheless see it as necessary to question the viability of their proposals. Indeed, in light of my analysis, a certain naïveté can be situated at the core of the impassioned accounts such as theirs, namely, the one concerning the actuality of what has happened and what is happening. Indeed, what my analysis suggests is that our post-truth predicament is the consequence of the unyielding pursuit of economic rationality, rather than a symptom of ‘genuine demands for breaking with the status quo’ (Farkas and Schou 2020: 126). A patent case in point here is the fact that the anti-capitalist social movements—such as, for instance, Extinction Rebellion—do not tend to utilize the post-truth frame. To be sure, post-truth tactics are the remit of the establishmentarian agents and alt-right conspiracists: the likes of Donald Trump, Brexiteers, and white supremacists—to name but a few. An argument could be, of course, made that such tactics are a response to the threat of systemic change posed by the anti-capitalist groups. Approaching post-truth as a tool of counter-critique (cf: Stypinska 2020), however, barely scratches the surface of its problematique, overlooking the deeper issue of the libidinal economy of which it is an expression. From this perspective, the call to keep reinventing the non-capitalist wheel ad infinitum, at the very best, smacks of poor strategy. Indeed, the problem is not the lack of viable alternatives. Alas, it seems to lay in the fact that the societies we live in seem to be more interested in ‘influencing’ and ‘trolling’—on- and offline—than paying any heed to structural solutions. This is not to imply that we ought to resign ourselves to the current state of affairs. Rather, I would suggest, it is to affirm the necessity of being cautious of the urge to purposiveness (cf: Agamben 2018). Being, as we are, the products of the Western paradigm that places action, rather than being, as the place of ethics, we are inadvertently positioned ‘in debt with respect to [our] own end’ (see Agamben 2018: 63). According to Giorgio Agamben, praxis ‘is the place where this debt is settled and incessantly rekindled’ (Agamben 2018: 63). As such, purposiveness is yet another trap. Or, to put this differently, it is another expression of the paradigm of efficacy that culminates in sheer functionality (cf: Heron 2018). Agamben argues that the way out of this logic is the embrace of ‘impotentiality’: ‘not simply the potential to do this or that thing but potential to not-do, potential not to pass into actuality’ (1999: 180). This, he asserts, constitutes the ‘possibility of privation’ (Agamben 1999: 181) [author’s emphasis]. The key, in short, is to deactivate the economic apparatus, making it inoperative. As Agamben explains, inoperativity is not another action alongside and in addition to all other actions, not another work beyond all works: It is the space—provisional and at the same time non-temporal, localized and at the same time extra-territorial—that is opened when the apparatuses that link human actions in the connection of means and ends, of imputation and fault, of merit and demerit, are rendered inoperative. (2018: 85) Such a space can be opened by thinking. However, following Miguel de Beistegui, I contend that the thinking that we need is not simply ‘a natural disposition’, ‘one we can decide to activate (or not)’ (2022: 2). It emerges, and does so slowly, at times painfully, whether individually or historically. It struggles to come to life, and it struggles to survive. It is constantly fighting off demons that continue to haunt it, perpetually rising from the mud that lies at the bottom of its pond. It is an effort, and it needs all the help it can get to get off the ground. (Beistegui 2022: 2) Such thinking is a matter of care—care unencumbered by urgency or, indeed, expediency. Care that begins with introspection and aims at the development of ‘a full, perfect, and complete relationship of oneself to oneself’ (Foucault 2005: 320). It is a thinking that understands its own process and is capable of resisting the imperative to the perpetual actualization of praxis. Thinking, that is, whose purpose exceeds purposiveness. I appreciate that this is not exactly the ‘practical solution’ that so many of us are after, and that the picture I paint in this book is gloomy. To that, I respond with the words of Theodor Adorno: [w]ithin absolutized praxis, only reaction is possible and for this reason the reaction is false. Only thinking could offer an escape, and then only that thinking, the results of which are not prescribed—as is so frequently in those discussions in which it is predetermined who is right and which therefore do not advance the cause—but rather degenerate without fail into tactics. When the doors are barricaded, it is doubly important that thought not be interrupted. It is rather the task of thought to analyse the reasons behind this situation and to draw the consequences from these reasons. It is the responsibility of thought not to accept the situation as finite. If there is any chance of changing the situation, it is only through undiminished thought. (1991: 200, 201) The surrendering of one’s thinking to the solutionist imperative implies its instrumentalization. Hence, in sooth, it is an act of resignation—and of neglect. Recall the ancient philosophical practices of the care of the self and others that I keep returning to throughout this book: the Socratic endeavours to induce a constant perplexity, the Cynics’ embraces of re-evaluation as a driving principle of the mode of life. These were the actions irreducible to their immediate effects. They agitated the sensibilities to unsettle the dominant rationality. They did not prescribe; they were an imperative to ‘open thinking’ that ‘points beyond itself’ (cf: Adorno 1991: 202). Consider also the Foucauldian conception of subjectivity as a point of tension between the self and the world, as something irreducible to the existing expectations and desires. Digital simulations pixelate this tension, turning it, and therefore our very (dis)positions, to mere code. With the news that metaverse is on its way (see Anderson and Rainie 2022), we ought to seriously consider the automatizing implications of the digital technologies of the subject. Further simulation will not save us; it will only intensify the neglect of that which makes us human. To care, and to transform, we must learn how to think openly.