[-empyre-] Trumpulism

[simon]

On 15/03/17 16:28, Alan Sondheim wrote to "the US has no experience of 
the fabrication of popular truths to support political regimes."
>
> */This just isn't true; during the Vietnam war tne 'Pentagon' was 
> consistently lying, not only about actions, but also about body 
> counts, etc.; Fire in the Lake, I believe, has covered that in depth. 
> We've had our share of fake news all the way along - even the 
> onslaught years ago by the tobacco lobby.../* 

... yes, I put that badly, sorry. What I meant was the fabrication by 
totalitarian orders of an atmosphere where the truth is a consensual lie 
and the difference between the two is in the (potential) force applied: 
I'll say it is so, as long as it what 'most' people agree, despite 
knowing, with 'most' people, it is a lie popularised by the regime... 
and if tomorrow it changes, with 'most' people, with whom I happen to 
agree, I will say yesterday's truth was a lie. But here the force that 
is applied is a kind of consensus from which has been removed every 
impurity, in the evidence of force, in the evidence of any evidence, of 
fingerprints or any human contact, of it having been manipulated, or 
wrongdoing, ... it is as clean as data, clean as an algorithm. (And here 
perhaps enters <<empyre's>> other theme, of a mediated digital culture, 
of one being maintainable or conceivable.)

The question of what Alan calls "critique-in-opposition" is of an 
immanent critique: the truth (of the opposition) will not puncture the 
bubble (of the consensus) but is a part of its swirling phantasmagoria.

Best,
Simon