»The Time is out of Joint«

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Fake news as a floating signifier: hegemony, antagonism and the politics of falsehood

‘Fake news’ has emerged as a global buzzword. While prominent media outlets, such as The New York Times, CNN, and CBS, have used the term to designate misleading information spread through websites, President Donald Trump has recently used the term as a negative designation of these very ‘mainstream media’. In this article, we argue that the concept of ‘fake news’ has become an important component in contemporary political struggles. We showcase how the term is utilised by different positions within the social space as a means of discrediting, attacking and delegitimising political opponents. Excavating three central moments within the construction of ‘fake news’, we argue that the term has increasingly become a ‘floating signifier’: a signifier lodged in-between different hegemonic projects seeking to provide an image of how society is and ought to be structured. By approaching ‘fake news’ from the viewpoint of discourse theory, the paper reframes the current stakes of the debate and contributes with new insights into the function and consequences of ‘fake news’ as a novel political category

Dependency Theory and the Aesthetics of Contrast in Fernando Solanas’s La hora de los hornos and Memoria del saqueo

This paper is a comparative analysis of two key documentaries by Fernando Solanas: La hora de los hornos / The Hour of the Furnaces (1966–68) and Memoria del saqueo / Social Genocide (2003). It argues that Solanas produces documentaries when the representative link that ties the political representatives to the represented (the people) is suspended or breaks down, as experienced during the times of the proscription of Peronism (1955–73) and in the more recent crisis of representation in Argentine institutional politics (1989–2001). The comparison follows two axes: political arguments and the aesthetics of contrast. Regarding the first criterion, the paper highlights the current persistence, in Solanas’s political argumentation, of externalist-mechanistic versions of dependency theory of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In relation to the aesthetics of contrast, it analyses the stark oppositions in Solanas’s documentaries as a visual rhetoric which can be read as an essentialist false-bottom economy that opposes ‘appearance’ to ‘reality’. The article concludes that these political and aesthetic polarizations are essentializing and literalizing discursive strategies that denounce the excesses of political representation from an unmediated and transparent site of full popular presence. Within such strategies, there is no room for the constitutive opacity intrinsic to representation and articulatory politics

Artikulacija in meje metafore

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A imanência consegue explicar os conflitos sociais?

Numa entrevista recente (vide RANCIÈRE, “Peuple ou multitudes: Question d'Eric Alliez à Jacques Rancière”, Multitudes n. 9, maio/junho 2002: 95-100), Jacques Rancière contrapõe sua noção de “povo” (peuple) (vide RANCIÈRE, La Mésentente. Paris: Galilée, 1995) à categoria de “multidão” como é apresentada pelos autores de Império. Como se sabe, Rancière distingue entre os dois sentidos da palavra “política”, sendo o primeiro a lógica de quantificar e designar a população a lugares diferenciados, enquanto o segundo subverte essa lógica diferenciadora por meio da constituição de um discurso igualitário que coloca em questão as identidades estabelecidas. “O povo” é o sujeito específico da política [politics] e pressupõe uma divisão expressiva no corpo social que impede o retorno a qualquer tipo de unidade imanente. A abordagem de Império, em contrapartida, faz da imanência sua categoria central e o fundamento último da unidade da multidão

Golo življenje ali družbena nedoločenost

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(A)notando la brecha: el sujeto de la política.

Traducción de Daniel Groisman y Juan Manuel Reynares