I gave a talk at Computers and Writing 2019 on Trump’s election and changes in the information landscape.
Access copy of the talk below.
Post-Truth, Post-Trump: Reflecting on the Future of Web Literacies
Vyshali Manivannan, Rutgers University School of Communication & Information
Computers & Writing, Fairfax, VA
May 27, 2018
Bruce McComiskey (2017), Michael Caulfield (2017), James Fredal (2011), and others have given us in-depth analyses of fake news rhetoric with regards to fact-checking, bullshit, framing, and confirmation bias. In reassessing post-truth web literacies with respect to fake news, I want to gesture towards fan culture, affect, and clinical theory, primarily Hiroki Azuma’s concept of the database animal, Mark Andrejevic’s analysis of affective commercial news, and phronesis in biomedical practice and narrative medicine.
Hiroki Azuma (2009) proposes the model of the “database animal” for the kind of consumer in the postmodern information age that doesn’t read stories in “a ‘human’ mode of consumption that longs for the existence of and searches for deeper meaning.” Instead, the “animalized” consumer craves stories that slot neatly into familiar, graspable classification systems based on a character’s appearance and personality traits. This in turn makes for a kind of “database,” which refers to both a searchable program or site and a kind of worldview. In this model, cultural products like anime—Azuma’s subject of study—or television shows are consumed for immediate gratification, the bolstering of a preconceived feeling or ideology based not on consumption of a narrative but on character traits with predictable associations, like the shrine maiden or the duped voter. Narrative meaning ultimately becomes secondary to the emotional satisfaction derived from consuming these elements, primarily to quiet a desire.
As with the anime-consuming database animal, “character traits” from hairstyle to mental illness seem selected or recombined to enable audiences to find the familiar and thereby satisfy these desires. For instance, the “frat-boy nationalism” of news networks like Fox deploys a highly commercialized patriotism that frequently mobilizes or weaponizes affect in favor of hyper-masculinity and around and against marginalized identities, each represented with the permutable traits a database animal looks. Andrejevic observes that fan communities and political constituencies are analogous in their reliance on affective bonds between fans and characters, and voters and candidates. According to Andrejevic, the affective appeal of fanship is its relative stakelessness, or what Brian Massumi (2005) describes as the “tautology of affect”: that is, there are no larger issues at stake, and the event and its outcomes are only about themselves, with no external consequences. As with Massumi’s notion of “affective facts” that generate their own truths, rational, critical deliberation ends up debunked by visceral feeling.
In this kind of news, the stakes of a political choice matter less than the affective charge that sticks to a candidate. This mediated production of political affiliation as fanship maybe helps explain how increased media coverage results in a less informed, “animalized” public. Affective commercial news caters to this by deploying suffering bodies as affective currency traded on compassion or outrage, framed as archetypes detached from verifiable truths, lived experience, and agency. Mass media gives us figures who provoke schadenfreude, like the Trump voter who survived cancer; nonwhite figures who arouse tabloid curiosity, subjects-made-objects whose experience is reduced to fetishistic clickbait; or ailing figures who vanish, effaced to incite general feelings of superiority. By and large, post-Trump news stories produced, circulated, and reacted to online seem to offer preexisting two-dimensional characters, like these, to be read like fiction with nothing at stake, intended to satisfy consumers’ surface desires without deep, meaningful investment or understanding of real bodily consequence. Intrinsically embodied and habituated as it is, phronesis as particular to philosophies of care might help students, and the rest of us, better identify this news “fanon” and learn to respond in ways that redress its stakelessness. In other words, we need literacies that allow us to imagine the lived bodily stakes of these “characters” to achieve intersubjectivity where subjectivities have been erased.
Maybe this means developing a clinical phronesis, wherein the doctor or “reader” temporarily yields their subject position to render the suffering body knowable. The phronesis that transpires in clinical settings and narrative medicine means viewing symptoms or “texts” against a larger system in which they possess individual, systemic, generic, and cumulative importance; accounting for intertextuality, whereby neighboring symptoms or texts are given meaning; and cataloguing, as part of a larger writing project, the archetypal traits deployed in affective commercial news to commute bodily suffering into emotional shorthand. Thus, we end up thinking with stories as well as about them to activate imagination, empathy, and intersubjectivity, to notice how news “fanon” flattens bodies, and to restore personhood to those bodies, their affects, and their lived, material realities.
What are the narratively satisfying archetypes of suffering bodies? Mass media gives us figures who provoke schadenfreude, like the Trump voter who survived cancer; figures who arouse tabloid curiosity, subjects-made-objects whose experience is reduced to fetishistic clickbait; or figures who vanish, effaced to incite general feelings of superiority. By and large, post-Trump news stories produced, circulated, and reacted to online seem to offer preexisting two-dimensional characters, like these, to be read like fiction with nothing at stake, intended to satisfy consumers’ surface desires without deep, meaningful investment or understanding of real bodily consequence.
These situations are presented as always-already intractable. All there is to do is feel in accordance with partisan affiliation. (For instance, we are invited to see the Trump voter with cancer as either easily condemned to death, or betrayed and pitiable, depending on our political alignment.) In this affective news economy, bodily suffering becomes archetypal, emotionally appealing, detached from the real stakes of domestic and international policy.
In this kind of news, the stakes of a political choice matter less than the affective charge that sticks to a candidate. Like fanship, this attachment exists for its own sake, independent of actual policy preferences or real-world outcomes. This mediated production of political affiliation as fanship maybe helps explain how increased media coverage results in a less informed, “animalized” public. Strong commitment to a character archetype, detached from and regardless of the consequences, becomes pleasurable in and of itself. Although Azuma was describing otaku, the news consumer who seeks affective facts that reinforce their attachments and investments—or who is unwittingly trapped in an online echo chamber generated by what content is clicked, read, shared—seems to embody his concept of the database animal. The factual news “canon” is replaced with news “fanon,” where empirical stories are replaced with fandom-based “head-canons” that rely on personal feelings. Affective commercial news caters to this by deploying suffering bodies as affective currency traded on compassion or outrage, framed as archetypes detached from verifiable truths, lived experience, and agency. We end up with a database of permutable people with partisan traits who we are expected to root for or love to hate, creating and sustaining a worldview populated by stock characters whose suffering is monolithic, categorical, disembodied. (Like the underestimated, plucky magical girl, “characters” like the Parkland students indicate that either we will be saved by the unlikeliest of heroes, or, through the invocation of Adolf Hitler, a reliable cardboard villain in the database worldview, that everything good will perish.) Characteristics, not narratives about actual events, traumas, or policy debates, thereby determine affective alignment and political affiliation. With regards to web literacies, when we are encouraged to read for archetypal traits, we end up missing the larger picture.
In light of database animalization and commercialized affect, I see phronesis as a necessary step in reassessing post-truth online literacies. Intrinsically embodied and habituated as it is, phronesis as particular to philosophies of care might help students, and the rest of us, better identify news “fanon” and learn to respond in ways that redress its stakelessness. From a medical perspective, where bodies are concerned, phronesis inheres in the clinical encounter where physicians make decisions about states of suffering and forecast bodily outcomes. Rosa and Parodi (2010) observe that medicine relies on inferential knowledge that becomes instinctive through phronesis, through two moments in particular: “the search after signs and the reconstruction of a story.” Storytelling about bodies, like any other form of storytelling, involves a creator and consumer; what happens with that story depends on the consumer’s powers to absorb it, their interpretive accuracy, and the “database” of stories they already possess, against which the new one will be compared. This is the aesthetic approach of narrative medicine, privileging the cognitive and imaginative capacities required to absorb and appreciate the representation and reality of other and Othered bodies, to witness, to give meaning.
An ethical, empathetic clinical imagination seeks signs across sites of interpretation—the patient’s narration, the visible body, the non-apparent signals and substrates. Perhaps the database animal could be redeemed through web literacies that emphasize a similar search for signs as part of intertextual close reading—that presents permutable shorthand elements as a catalog in dire need of context and annotation, culled from a webtext’s form, content, reading publics, intended audience, existing commentary. Close reading and fact-checking are critical in the post-Trump era, but instead of trying to alter the apparently entrenched reading strategies of database animals, it might be more illuminating to identify when and where archetypes appear, and approach them as we do in fan culture—by charting basic profile stats, notable personality traits, background information, and so on—to recognize when we are consenting to interchangeable stock characters in place of real, unique bodies and give these characters flesh. In other words, we need literacies that allow us to imagine the lived bodily stakes of these “characters” to achieve intersubjectivity where subjectivities have been erased.
Maybe this means developing a clinical phronesis, wherein the doctor/reader temporarily yields their subject position to render the suffering body knowable. Just as the reader is an active instrument in creating the text, as their makeup and behavior influence the hermeneutic exercise, the clinician in the act of “reading” bodily signs across sites of interpretation actively reconstructs embodied experience. The phronesis demanded in the clinic is imaginative by necessity. Rita Charon describes it as “the courage to relinquish one’s own coherent experience of the world for another’s unexplored, unplumbed, potentially volatile viewpoint… One need not have experienced the patient’s ordeal or even have felt sorry for him or her in order to achieve a clinical stance from which one can help: one needs to see the world from the vantage point of the patient and to experience, vicariously, events from that stance.” Framed as such, the literary or bodily text is able to activate our faculties for empathy and to cultivate phronesis in us.
In his analysis of narrative and pain, Arthur Frank (2004) suggests that a lack of narrative imagination generates mutual alienation. Frank summarizes phronesis thus: “A person develops phronesis by taking his or her values through the trials of multiple actions and by reflecting on the outcomes. Experience enables a person to know where certain courses of action are likely to succeed. Phronesis is the opposite of acting on the basis of scripts and protocols.” The database animal and the affective commercial news consumer both rely on scripts and protocols to grasp a story, as they both privilege rapid categorization and emotional satisfaction over narrative. By contrast, the phronesis that transpires in clinical settings and narrative medicine means viewing symptoms/texts against a larger system in which each possesses individual, systemic, generic, and cumulative importance; accounting for intertextuality, whereby neighboring symptoms/texts are given meaning; cataloguing, as part of a larger writing project, the archetypal traits deployed in affective commercial news to commute bodily suffering into emotional shorthand. Brought to bear on the diminished or disappearing bodies of mass media, this is literally “diagnosing” news as canon or fanon. Pedagogically speaking, teaching our students (and ourselves) to “diagnose” before close reading or analyzing, by identifying, grouping, coding, and rationalizing the “symptoms” of texts and their publics, reminds us to think with stories as well as about them. Frank promotes this as a way for clinicians to think diagnostically about and attempt to forge a therapeutic alliance with a suffering body. Thinking with stories activates imagination, empathy, intersubjectivity, and tacitly prods us to notice how news “fanon” flattens bodies, and to restore subjectivity and personhood to those bodies, their affects and their lived, material realities.
Works Cited
Andrejevic, M. (2013). Infoglut: How too much information is changing the way we think and know. Routledge.
Azuma, H. (2009). Otaku: Japan’s database animals. University of Minnesota Press.
Caulfield, M. (2017). Web literacy for student fact-checkers. Washington State University.
Charon, R. (2006). Narrative medicine: Honoring the stories of illness. Oxford University Press.
Frank, A. (2004). Asking the right question about pain: Narrative and phronesis. Literature and Medicine, 23(2), 209-225.
Fredal, J. (2011). Rhetoric and bullshit. College English, 73(3), 243-259.
Herman, C. (2018, Apr 9). For chronic pain, a change in habits can beat opioids for relief. NPR.
Howard, J. (2017, Nov 16). Childbirth is killing black women in the U.S., and here’s why. CBS News.
Infowars. (2018, Mar 25). Hitler Youth student gun control march invades Washington.
Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Duke University Press.
McComiskey, B. (2017). Post-truth rhetoric and composition. Utah State University Press.
Parker-Pope, T. (2018, Mar 30). Are today’s teenagers smarter and better than we think? The New York Times.
Rosa, F., & Parodi, A. (2010). Medicine among métis, phrónesis and téchne. Medicina e Morale, 59(1), 57-74.
Wallace, D. (2017, Sept 25). Trump voter who survived cancer: Graham-Cassidy health bill worst by far. USA Today.
