The reveal of the real: Fact-checking ‘not-tags’ in the current conjuncture

Abstract

This chapter tackles contemporary mediated politics through a discussion of the hashtag as an interstice of the Real and as a vital site for the (re)production of ideology. Popular media discussions regularly pivot off an audit of how ‘reality’ is (re)presented and circulates. Such discussions hinge on a vaunting of the signifier and leverage a politics of the ‘reveal’ of the ‘actual’ significance of media texts, as opposed to their ideological meaning, as crucial to critique. This approach is valuable. Nonetheless, in this paper, I consider the limitations of this reveal-of-the-real. I argue that the binarised logic of the ‘reveal’ hinges on an understanding of ideology anchored in a consideration of signification as a mischievous ‘masking’ of ‘actual’ conditions. This approach, I suggest, this approach to ideology needs to be nuanced through an account of the Lacanian psychoanalytic Real—showing popular media representations as more than simply the devious machinations of ‘false consciousness’ demanding of an illumination of ‘things as they really are’. My grappling with the Real works through a discussion of psychoanalytic approaches to negation (via Žižek and Zupančič) which, I think, go some way towards accounting for the recent rise of reactionary politics. I focus on two popular media locations to demonstrate the intersection of the Real and ideology. Firstly, I look at fact-checking news websites as indicative of the ‘reveal-of-the-real’ approach and demonstrate the limitations of this for public critique and as a counter to hegemonic ideology. Secondly, I look at the ascent of a particular hashtag (#) on twitter: what I call the ‘not-tag’—hashtags which begin with a disavowal of ‘#not…’. I focus on the still-trending not-tag #NotMyPresident. I contend that the reveal logic used by both fact-checking journalism and not-tags depends on a binarised understanding of ideology as an Imaginary, expressed in the Symbolic (generally in media representations), which covers over ‘real relations’. This chapter is intended as a location and a provocation, swivelling off from the current preoccupation with the ‘real’ in popular discourse.