Post-veracity. Aesthetics in politics, rhetoric of everyday life, life-styles

Abstract

A strange obsession for truth seems to define the present time: injunction to truth-telling, call to being authentic, fear of the fake are some of the features characterizing practices and rethorics of our living together. The realm of politics appears to be a privileged ground to this end, being able to grasp the symptoms diffused in the everyday life and configure them into steady models of behaviour through the effectiveness of its (self)representations. This paper aims to address the rhetoric pervasiveness of the concept of truth by inquiring the semantic field deployed by neologism “truthiness” and its Italian translation “veracità”, tentatively defined as a “natural” truth that presents itself without mediation or filters and keeps together diverse phenomena, from popular wisdom to food wholesomeness. As a matter of fact, the need for witnessing one’s genuine and truthful being seems to be the recurrent feature in several cultural expressions of the present time, as well as in the subsequent subjectivation processes. The goal of the paper is thus to analyse this “aesthetics of truthiness” to outline its specific enunciative strategies that testify how the matter of post-truth should be addressed primarily in terms of behaviours instead of knowledge.