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Our contemporary moment is preoccupied with arbitrating 'reality'. With the spectre of buzzwords like 'fake news' and 'post-truth' we find a scramble to locate or fix some sort of universal 'real' beneath what are positioned as 'fake' articulations. To engage with this crisis, this collection argues for the importance of a new conjuncture in communication and cultural studies of media. Building on Hall's understanding of 'conjuncture' as a way of grasping moments within hegemonic struggle, the essays suggest that the current moment requires a revitalization of the concept of conjuncture.
List of contents
Chapter 1: Introduction: Post-Truth and the Mediation of Reality.- Chapter 2: Fake President: Telemorphosis and the performance of grotesque power.- Chapter 3: The White Noise of Desire.- Chapter 4: Postmodernism in the twenty first century: Culture wars, antagonism and the problem of truth.- Chapter 5: Beyond Post-truth as Mediation: From fascism and neoliberalism to fake news.- Chapter 6: The reveal of the Real in hashtag politics.- Chapter 7: Veils of prejudice: race and class in the current conjuncture.- Chapter 8: Pre-truth, Post-truth and the Present: Jacques Lacan and the Real Horror of Contemporary Knowledge.- Chapter 9: Civility, Subversion and Technocratic Class Consciousness: Reconstituting Truth in the Journalistic Field.
About the author
Brett Nicholls is Head of Media, Film and Communication at the University of Otago, New Zealand. His work focuses on media, culture and politics, technology, and critical theory, and has been published in Continuum, Communication, Culture & Critique and Critical Horizons.
Rosemary Overell is Lecturer at the University of Otago, New Zealand. She is the author of Affective Intensities in Extreme Music Scenes (2014) and co-editor, with Catherine Dale, of Orienting Feminisms (2018). Rosemary is also a regular contributor to un Magazine and tweets @muzaken.
Summary
Our contemporary moment is preoccupied with arbitrating ‘reality’. With the spectre of buzzwords like ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ we find a scramble to locate or fix some sort of universal ‘real’ beneath what are positioned as ‘fake’ articulations. To engage with this crisis, this collection argues for the importance of a new conjuncture in communication and cultural studies of media. Building on Hall’s understanding of ‘conjuncture’ as a way of grasping moments within hegemonic struggle, the essays suggest that the current moment requires a revitalization of the concept of conjuncture.
