Miscommunications by Timothy Barker;Maria Korolkova;

Author:Timothy Barker;Maria Korolkova;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781501363849
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

11

Negotiating Two Models of Truth

Miscommunication, Aesthetics, and Democracy in Elle and Laruelle

Alex Lichtenfels

New York Times reporter Ron Suskind recalls a miscommunication with a Bush aide (reputedly Karl Rove (Englehardt 2014)) during the Second Iraq War:

The aide said that guys like me were “In what we call the reality‐based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” [. . .] “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” (2004)

According to this analysis, for the reporter, the fact that reality corresponds to facts is important in deciding how to act. Alternatively, for the aide the action itself, rendered by military power, creates the reality upon which the justification for the action can retroactively be applied.

This analysis can be extended to current media representations in a “post‐truth” landscape. For example, after Donald Trump’s inauguration, his press secretary Sean Spicer claimed that “This was the largest audience ever to ever witness an inauguration, period” (qtd. by Swaine 2017), later defended by White House aide Kellyanne Conway, saying that he had given “alternative facts” (qtd. by Swaine 2017) despite evidence to the contrary such as photos of the event and transit data.

The usual formula has been for different parties privy to this type of communication to declare other parties to be lying, as seen in Trump’s repeated accusations of the liberal media’s fake news (e.g., Pak and Seler 2018; Massie 2017) and of the New York Times’ documentation of Trump’s lies (e.g., Leonhardt and Thompson 2017). Each party believes that there is no miscommunication, but that both know the “real” truth and that the other party is lying. Conversely, this chapter takes seriously the proposition that each side of a communication may operate according to different concepts of truth and that therefore no appeal can be made to a common ground that would solve the miscommunication by allowing both sides to understand its “true” meaning. The debate is couched in terms of the classically liberal media that uses a correspondence theory of truth in which truth is true because it corresponds to facts, and of emerging media, particularly those associated with populism, which often use a coherence theory of truth in which truth is true because it is internally coherent. Through an analysis of Paul Verhoeven’s Elle (2016), the chapter discusses how media objects not only operate within different truth systems but also shape those very systems, suggesting that for coherentists, media representations can determine truth. Elle is used as an example of a media object that appears to critique coherentist truth systems, but actually uses many of these systems’ aesthetic strategies in order to engage its audience. As a middlebrow European film, it is also chosen as an example of how coherence truth systems and the media aesthetics through which they function are by no means limited to the lowbrow American culture with which they are often associated.

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