Abstract
Keywords
Few things are more challenging than the certainty of ‘what we see’ today, in the post-truth era. People and events can be other than how we see them, and the given frames of seeing can always be deceptive. In that sense, the most significant impact of post-truth on society is the regime of invisibility that it creates. Hence, without clarifying post-truth’s deceptive, even manipulative distortions in ‘seeing’, and without investigating the obscure zone between the visible and the invisible, we cannot properly portray this contemporary situation. The term ‘post-truth’ itself asks for an elucidation since it is presently used in several different senses. At first, ‘post-truth’ described, theoretically, a distancing from monolithic truth claims and by criticizing them, it helped to draw attention to variations in meaning relations. With this critique, the term undoubtedly marks an important achievement of contemporary philosophy. Nevertheless, it did not take long for the same term to be used to equate the truth values of those possible variations and relations by claiming that they can be equally true in another context and can be justified accordingly. By adding ‘transparency’ claims in politics, ‘what we see’ becomes even more difficult to detect in these changing contexts. One may recall the changing discourses and ‘transparent documents’ of the Iraq War in the last decades.
‘Transparency’ suggests that what is exhibited is true, yet this ‘truth’ usually contradicts our common experiences and, as a result, post-truth in a political context refers increasingly to a state of confusion, obscurity and relativity as a result of our incapacity to access reality beyond pre-given frames. On the pages that follow,
If these observations about our current state are accurate, this should give rise to further, and perhaps more urgent, questions: what makes that level of confusion, obscurity and deception possible? Or rather, what makes people so frail in distinguishing the truth? This article will investigate these questions – first, by focusing on the conditions of ‘seeing’ in relation to plurality, and second, by interpreting seeing as an ‘active engagement’ in constituting the reality of others as well as one’s own. The premises here underscore that being a concrete ‘seeing body’ and being ‘seen by others’ are at the bottom of our sense of reality, and without such embodied concreteness anyone can turn into an abstract, invisible ‘nobody’, finally losing the sense of reality, their own as well as the world’s. Indeed, be it a politician, a bureaucrat or a citizen, we can wonder about those who are expected to remain invisible nobodies and follow the most efficiently useful pre-given version of reality: why would truth matter to them? If there is to be a more genuine remedy for the constantly changing realities of the post-truth situation, its source can be found in a demand for seeing from all possible aspects, by questioning who and what remains invisible in the different forms of seeing, and by reaching towards a broader sense of reality that results from this joint and plural seeing
To articulate this demand and to emphasize what is absent from our current situation, the first section of this article explores the phenomenological meaning of visibility, pointing out how the phenomenological conception of visibility can contribute to a more plural and diverse politics. The second and third parts examine different forms of invisibility. The second part shows that facts can become invisible in the discourse of transparency, which has been used as a tool for manipulating public opinion in terms of what, or who, would be ‘permitted’ to appear and to be seen. Hannah Arendt’s reading of the Pentagon Papers and Judith Butler’s interpretation of photographic documents from Abu Ghraib are two striking case studies in what happens when the boundaries of what is permitted to be seen are traversed. 2
The third section discusses the visibility of people, in relation to the authoritarian tendencies in today’s politics, which insists on being the only force that should decide what is to be seen: members of different societal institutions, as well as the public, are expected not only to see the truth within the limits of a pre-given, imposed frame, but also to become invisible ‘nobodies’,
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displaying neither
I. A phenomenological conception of visibility
Phenomenology and its elucidations of visibility opened up a promising segment in political theory by examining the meaning of appearances of things and persons and their intrinsically manifold ways of showing themselves. In Arendt’s political theory, one can observe the influence of the temporal and spatial manifoldness of the world and how it is interpreted as a ground for the relationality of the world.
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Arendt’s phenomenological interpretations in
Another phenomenological assumption relevant to the current confusions in the discourses of truth is Husserl’s understanding of the meaning of an appearance and its role in the constitution of reality. Today, we encounter the reduction of truth to factual truth,
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and it seems impossible to discern the gap between the two. The critique of the misconception of truth as factual truth is an epistemological point of departure for Husserl’s phenomenology: as he writes in the
In both Husserl’s and Arendt’s critiques, we encounter the call for a fundamental distinction between objectified factual data and the meaning of appearances. Factuality is overall a contingent category,
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and a mathematical transposition of factual data (e.g. in statistics) cannot substitute what it represents (such as the correlation between a number and a person). Therefore, they cannot result in truth as such; all factual relations can be a matter of change, they can always be ‘otherwise’.
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By contrast, appearances are part of how we experience the world as such, be it individually or collectively. By sharing and confirming what remains the same and what is common in how we see the world, our bodily experiences not only constitute the reality of the world for us, but, in the intertwined unity of our bodies and consciousness, they constitute our own reality. Moreover, a ‘world for us’ can only open up in the interactions of embodied and intersubjective experiences; only in this way can the world become a ‘reliable home’
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for
Once aspects of reality are described in their multitude, in their infinite possibilities, and, our ways of experiencing reality are understood as infinite, we enter a field that promises an open horizon for embodied experiences. Yet, if this realm is reduced to an individualistic frame of the ‘world for
II. The limits of seeing: Transparency
Although it refers to a form of visibility, ‘transparency’ is among the few terms that clearly reflect the perplexity in contemporary discourses of truth. There are several reasons for this; first, in one aspect, transparency refers to and affirms the
In the transparency claims, the dubious good intent of making data accessible to all hardly explains how they might function in political discourses. Several examples force us to rethink the role of the unseen parts of what is given as reality, of the ‘transparent’ and the mediums that deliver it, as well as the ends to which it is given. The parallel between Arendt’s writings on Pentagon’s Vietnam papers and Butler’s analyses of the documented war crimes at Abu Ghraib deserves particular attention: both of them expose the fact that only a part of reality is permitted to be seen, and that what is ‘transparent’ about those political events is tied to manipulative tactics for shaping public opinion. As Arendt explains, anything can be made an instrument in the chain of ends and means, and, along the way, the truth claim of any discourse can be forgotten; lying can become ordinary practice in politics, and predetermined frames 20 can substitute reality.
In her essay ‘Lying in Politics’, Arendt exposes and questions what the Pentagon Papers can tell us about politics and how deeply deception can lodge itself in the political decision processes.
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She begins ironically, with the claim that truthfulness, in the full sense, has never been counted among the political virtues, and
Butler’s analyses of the photographs of war crimes at Abu Ghraib proceed in similar direction. The photographs reveal not only the gap between the contradictory transparency discourses of the Iraq War, but also the frailty of what can be disclosed in this pre-given, fabricated reality – ‘framed’ reality in Butler’s words.
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The accidental emergence of photographs made by an American soldier in the Iraq War forced a change in the discourse about the war that before had obviously been orchestrated by the Department of Defense
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– but not only that. The photographs revealed a gap between the structure of the reality as claimed, and what it actually was. In that sense, the photographs exposed a lived and witnessed reality of ‘lose-able lives’,
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the torture and humiliation practiced at Abu Ghraib. What appears in this open gap between realities as given and as witnessed, as Butler remarks, is what these ‘frames of war’ exhibit with regard to visibility. In her dialogue with Susan Sontag, Butler says that perhaps she was telling that ‘in seeing the photos,
What these instances make clear is that, regarding visibility, ‘transparency’ is a deceptive term, either in its claim of showing all that there is to be seen, or by supplying a view from a particular angle. Today we mostly learn from photojournalism that ‘transparent’ documents open to the public and containing the numbers concerning refugees and their life conditions do not represent their reality.
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Instead, such documents decide what part of their lives is to be made visible, reducing the rest to numbers and matters of negotiation. These instances reveal the accidental nature of partial and pre-given reality made accessible to the public by ‘transparent’ policies. It is evident that ‘shaping’ opinion requires an institutional system and a public who can be adapted to this frame. What deserves further investigation is the intriguing parallel between the people who shape and dictate this form of reality, and the people who are its subjects. This brings us to the Arendtian notions of ‘no-man’s rule’ and of ‘nobody’, both of which direct our attention to the contrasting term of
III. The limits of seeing: Invisible persons
The administrative ‘nobody’
If we return to the question of what makes people so frail in distinguishing the truth from lies in the post-truth era, the answer invites us to examine the extent to which people actively engage in seeing events, others and themselves. The double act of ‘seeing ourselves seeing’ is the utmost reflective form of visibility. This form of seeing is attuned to Arendt’s conception of appearance, for it refers to an active form of visibility that exceeds the bodily senses of presence and witnessing, emphasizing our capacity to interrupt and change the course of the reality that we are seeing. Initiative, for her, is a form of insertion,
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an active and interruptive form of participation that affirms our appearance among others. In that sense, becoming someone is the personal experience of taking the initiative of interrupting a pre-given course of events, and only this courage
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to interrupt can make people ‘visible’ to themselves and to others. For that reason, she introduces initiative as a precondition of biography – of attaining a history and becoming some-one. By contrast, Arendt also introduces a
When we begin discussing the problems of a system or a society, what we lose from the beginning at first hand is the reality of the persons involved, as we fail to think of these people in terms of their individuality. Arendt’s views on who-ness and bureaucracy can help to explain why we fail to think them in their distinction. Extending her remarks on how who-ness and its appearance form an interruptive process,
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the distinctive quality of identity is something that discloses the uniqueness of the individuals in their words and deeds. Hence, in contrast with the repetitive and habitual forms of biological necessity, political difference reveals itself in the new. However, for Arendt the modern age is marked by significant losses precisely in that respect, and by a forgetfulness of the political capacity to engage in activities that can disclose one’s distinctiveness. As Arendt points out in her various essays, the lack of initiative is the blueprint of an economically determined society, and can be observed in its administrative apparatus, its politicians and its bureaucrats. It is characteristic of the political institution, in which everything is reduced to paid jobs,
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the quality most desired and sought after is that of being able to do what one is told. To Arendt, this precludes the possibility of addressing individuals as persons – people with life stories of their own, people capable of exercising their difference. In a life thus marked by the loss of the interruptive capacity of action, speech and judgment, individuals are robbed of their who-ness and degraded to
These elucidations on the modern age lead us to follow its roots in the formation of modern state and the role of nobody in the post-truth era. Arendt describes the modern state in its transformation of monarchic rule into ‘a kind of no-man rule’ and identifies the final stage in the development of nation-state government as the bureaucratic ‘rule by nobody’. 36 She adds that ‘the rule by nobody is not necessarily no-rule; it may indeed, under certain circumstances, even turn out to be one of its crudest and most tyrannical versions’. 37 In stark parallel with what characterizes its administrators, the major aim of such a system is to ‘normalize’ its members, replacing action by behavior, 38 and particularly excluding the possibility of spontaneous action. Given this description of mass society, it comes as no surprise when Arendt mentions that, due to the rise of economic interest and conformism, statistics is made the ‘chief technical tool’, in which ‘acts and events can statistically appear only as deviations and fluctuations’ 39 as effectively used in transparency claims. Indeed, what is at stake today is conceiving appearances in terms of these deviations, and the replacement of the political by economic wellbeing, which reduces the members of a community to statistical data, or to their share in the economy – as pointed out earlier, just as today’s refugee and migration policies symptomatically define people in terms of numbers and their threat to the economy.
In light of these analyses, we can consider a politics and bureaucracy without initiative as a form of systemic invisibility; a process that mutually generates situations like post-truth, in which the who-ness of its constituents does not matter, but what matters instead is their capacity to do what they are told, such that either of its members or reality can be seen as a tool of ‘social wellbeing’. In the further analysis of the marginal figures of ‘nobody’ and ‘somebody’, we shall have to deal with their co-belonging in the human condition, and find out how to posit them in their relationality. Following Butler’s words, these two are inevitably part of the same ‘relationality’ of the same ‘vulnerable’ structure. 40 Indeed, if plurality refers to the web of relations, making relationality an ontological premise of this web, how should we deal with those who neither appear fully nor fully disappear, those who remain in the abyss between appearance and non-appearance?
Imposed invisibility
Despite their richness, Arendt’s notions of plurality and reality leave us with a number of challenging questions regarding visibility, relationality and the status of those not permitted to be seen. As indicated earlier, the administrative category of ‘nobody’ demands that its subjects share the quality of being impersonated nobodies, anonymous subjects. Although this is required of all subjects, the imperative is not directed at everyone with the same intensity. It is most insistently directed at the more resistant groups, who are frequently ignored or erased from being reflected even among the ‘deviations and fluctuations’. 41 By being pushed across the boundaries of visibility, these groups are the most easily suppressed. This is the case of political opposition groups, migrants, refugees, 42 victims of colonial, racial and gender oppression, among other groups denied political visibility. Precisely because of what they have to endure at the borders of being seen, it is possible to observe the strongest sense of visibility in the way of their resistance: in 2021, despite governmental restrictions, despite today’s possible technological devices and media, street demonstrations erupted both globally and locally – from global ‘Black Lives Matter’ demonstrations to the protests against the rising femicide rates in Türkiye. These street demonstrations were not simply a habitual form of political action and require further examinations on the role of bodily visibility and the demand for “being seen” in resistance.
On March 8, 2021, more than ten thousand women participated in a feminist night walk to protest the femicides in Istanbul. Twelve days later, the Turkish government suspended the Istanbul Convention, 43 which protects women and their rights against various forms of violence. For those women, their demonstrations on Taksim Square were not only a surpassing of the ‘permissible’ limits of appearing and bodily presence in the eyes of the public, but also a declaration of their will: ‘We will not accept and yield’. This slogan-turned-hashtag gained immense support in the social media. The suspension of the Istanbul Convention was a direct response to those women’s claim to this degree of visibility, and turned into a ‘punishment’, by ‘taking back’ the rights that had been previously ‘given’ to women. In that sense, it was a signal that what is ‘given’ can be ‘taken’, should they attempt to become ‘willful subjects’, as accurately described by Sara Ahmed. 44
Once again, the sequence of events leads us to examine the political meaning of appearing as
Witnessing the same reality, as in the case of street demonstrations, our presence among others can be analyzed in terms of ‘seeing ourselves seeing’. In this way of seeing, we encounter the most robust form of initiative, and only by this solid visuality, this confrontation, can another layer yet open up. In other words, this double seeing, seeing the event and seeing ourselves in the changing course of the event, can construct the body politic in its genuine meaning, by interrupting the course of events jointly, and making ourselves present for one another in our embodied unities. If encountering the manifoldness of perception of a thing’s material appearance – in the widest sense, the world – is the ground for all other forms of appearances, then, similarly to this fundamental function of the world, the material body has a similar function as the inseparable correlate of this world.
Therefore, without a decent theory of bodily visibility, 46 we can find ourselves confronting incoherent political theories which open a gap between abstract citizenship and actual individuals, and which could easily replace visibility by instrumental transparency and its invisible subjects. Because of the utmost sense of presence in the unity of body and initiative evident in street demonstrations, protests that use this presence are protests in the strongest sense. Even where resistance is performed in silence, 47 it can become one of the most effective ways of a resilient stand. Hence, the symmetry between the power of demonstrations and state violence, and the violence used by governments against initiative, should not surprise us.
IV. A demand for a politics of the invisible
Political visibility has an undeniable significance: the less visible the people are, the more vulnerable they are in their capacity to protect their rights, and the more they suffer in their isolated state – as numerous examples, from domestic violence to Abu Ghraib, confirm. Removed from the public eye and from the reach of public support, their reality and visibility can become a subject of decisions that we witness frequently in the post-truth era. This vulnerable state can be replaced by another political stance and discussed under the rubric of ‘the politics of the invisible’. This political approach suggests that we need to engage critically with the political-economic agenda that insists that its administrators and subjects be perceived as equally invisible. These invisibles are presented here, first as Arendt’s ‘nobodies’ who have lost their visibility by not being seen as a person, reduced instead to a part or an instrument in the bureaucratic system. Second, they appear as figures forced to be invisible, whose existence is denied.
The phenomenological perspective on seeing clarifies the meaning of visibility and the role it can play in the post-truth era. The invisible, ‘not yet appeared’ sides of what we can see start a constructive interplay between the visible and the invisible. In this in-between, we constitute reality. As reality reflects what remains the same for us among the plurality of aspects and what we see together can save reality from distortions or reducing it to illusions or fictions. If we apply this phenomenological perspective to the category of becoming a person, the not-yet-seen possibilities of a person are related both to the body that appears in human plurality and to appearance in the web of relationships. 48 In both ways, whether it concerns my direct presence among others by embodied interaction or my inclusion in the web of relationships, my body is always what makes those interferences and interruptions possible. At this point, we can claim that not only who-ness, but the very recognition of a person is preconditioned by bodily appearance. As emphasized, that way of appearing requires a plurality of perspectives, and emphasizes the diversity of that plurality as an ontological ground for politics, by the inclusion of its invisibles beyond given borders. 49
Arendt’s and Butler’s plea for equal recognition of human beings cannot be limited to its ethical implications. Their observations can lead us to assess the matter in a more fundamental way, and can be taken to initiate a ground for the demand to be recognized in our existential unity, as visible bodily beings first and prior to following others. 50 This demand of visibility can contribute to the meaning of recognition, by saving it from being part of a general category. In Arendt’s case, recognition comes from the acceptance of others as equals in their difference and their unique stance, which rewards each member of the web of relationship. Butler, also referring to recognition, posits it as a fundamental prerequisite for relations with others. Her essay shows how fragile the structure of this recognition is, that it never applies to those whose appearance is denied, how easily these people can disappear, their humanity violated. Copious examples demonstrate the necessity of understanding persons beyond categories or generalizations; the prerequisite of recognition is to see them first as visible, embodied, singular persons. This recognition is no other than recognizing the possibility of a reality that can endure against distortions.
Reality indeed has different facets, and is fragile in the face of the newly revealed or even fabricated facts. When lives treated as impersonal generalities, they do not only generate and display a parallel between bureaucratic nobodies and invisible bodies, but also make it easier for the selected material to be made public in the transparency policies of the post-truth era. This fragility can only be overcome by engaging with real life stories; the plural aspects of reality that are witnessed can be a stable ground on which to withstand fabricated facts. The astonishingly simple measure proposed by Arendt in order to distinguish a real story from fiction is to see which one is being lived. 51
To access these lived lives, politics must embrace a first-level conception of singular embodied recognition and develop strategies against factors that reduce people to invisible nobodies. This new politics is
Footnotes
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