Pre-truth, post-truth and the present: Jacques lacan and the real horror of contemporary knowledge

Abstract

The relative success of the term ‘post-truth’—the Oxford Dictionary’s 2016 word of the year—belies the horror experienced at its use and significance. With its settlement into common parlance comes revulsion at what it indicates and what it might suggest for the future of those discourses that had so invisibly rested on the stability of ideas of truth and truthfulness. Yet these discourses themselves have a genealogy, despite their seeming permanence. Our contemporary guarantors of truth have their origins in such places as the European Wunder- and Kunstkammern that would in turn give rise to the museums and their associated discourses of knowledge to which contemporary truth must eventually return and refer if it is to be considered reputable and objective. Truth, if we follow the lead of Jacques Lacan, is necessarily conjunctural and thus forever becoming and always provisional. The intersection of knowledge production with the large scale (national and individual) identity (af-)firming projects of the Wunder or Kunstkammern and their contemporary institutional progeny provides us with the means to explore the relationship between the evolution of these two discourses; the museum as guarantor of truth, on the one hand, and the affirmed identity of the subject, on the other. The epistemological trajectory evidenced by the movement from Wunder- and Kunstkammern to museum (and beyond) are the evidence of this provisional status; this can be seen to match the ways in which the individual moves from Lacan’s register of the Imaginary towards an uneasy relationship with and in the Symbolic, with the Museum having historically served as an example of the Name of the Father by and against which truth is guaranteed, now no longer occupying the same position in this contemporary era of discursive conjuncture. Might then the horror of post-truth be the horror of Lacan’s Real, the true Truth of truth, with the glimpse afforded of what lies beyond truth being what is at stake in these moments? This chapter, informed by Lacan, seeks to explore the ways in which past conceptions of truth and knowledge haunt both the present collapse of stable, rational meaning in the contemporary crisis of a post-truth era and the anxieties of subjects aligned with those discourses.