ABSTRACT
This introduction has three goals: (1) introduce the book’s guiding themes and specific chapter contributions, primarily their critique of post-truth criticism as nostalgically inattentive to historical asymmetries of truth-telling, their geographical expansion of its study beyond the West, and their exposition of post-truth politics’ neglected cultural infrastructures; (2) provide a critical reading of trends in interdisciplinary post-truth literature, noting their shortcomings and proposing that Hannah Arendt’s concept of “factual truth” can allay problems of ambiguity and casual use; and (3), present my own unique contribution to post-truth theory, arguing that post-truth is firstly, contrary to influential definitions, not a disregard of “objective facts” trumped by “emotional appeals,” nor “information disorders,” nor increased political lying, but an anxious public mood about an approaching political dystopia, where political forces relentlessly try to undermine the very potential existence of publicly accepted facts, by which political problems can begin to be acknowledged and nonviolently resolved. Post-truth as a dystopic public mood is irreducible to academic-public criticism or discourses of post-truth, though they contribute to its anxiety. Post-truth emerges variously around the world as the failure of liberal democratic and authoritarian governments’ projects of popular control, now culminating in strategies to hyper-politicize factual truth and honesty.
