RETVRN to Truth: Moving Post-Truth Beyond the Death Drive
An analysis of the implications of psychosis being a productive style of knowledge production and reproduction.
Fascists online use a particular vaporwave style aesthetic meme which can only be described as an early internet aesthetic RETVRN which is sick with an aesthetic appropriation of fascist ideology in the form of short quotes or phrases designed to captivate a reader who was always too lazy to do the exercises the artist left for them. This aesthetic is called “fashwave”. Google Trends data on this search term shows that it hit a maximum number of searches in August 2018 and has been slowly declining since this time. I attempted to identify if there was some specific incident in August 2018 which would have correlated with a peak in searches for this, but the best answer I could find was that it was 1 year after the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which culminated in the murder of an antifascist organizer. Seeing as I was actively monitoring Nazis on 4chan’s /pol/ board for this year, I understood that the alt right was working hard to repair their severely incapacitated image after this (Americans, on average, don’t care for the Nazi aesthetic! “We beat them”, after all). I can imagine, as an organizer, when they planned the second occurrence of this protest in August 2018 and had a pitifully insignificant crowd, they too believed this wave of fascism reached the conclusion it would not succeed. Thus, there was a drop in the frequency of individuals looking up the insipid vaporwave fascist memes.
The trick I just used to deflect away from the fact that I have no idea (keep in mind, I looked up some deep cuts too) what caused the spike and then decline in searches of the word “fashwave”, is the same trick that is being played on you by almost all information that you hear. I just did it again too. In early 2016, a journalist named Louise Legoshi, put out this expose in The Atlantic detailing the linguistic history of Republican presidential front-runner, Donald Trump. I urge you to check out this essay. Her article was titled, “Post-truth: Making your Ideas Great Again”, where she coined the term “post-truth” to describe the burgeoning relationship with truth we have developed in our society in recent years. Legoshi claimed, that while Trump was a prodigious disciple of the style of post-truth, the nation would experience a revival of Enlightenment rationality which would give pause to the excitement towards Trump’s strange and enticing rhetoric. Living in December 2023, I can now state unequivocally, that she was entirely incorrect in her analysis; Legoshi’s empire was built on RETVRNing to a simulation of the past. Her worldview was built on echoes and afterimages from the thrill of first learning about Newton’s Laws.
“Post-truth” is a phrase like “postmodernism” and “fascism” such that it defies strict definition, but when you see it, you immediately identify it as such. More than anything, it is a semiotic trick. It is a relationship that the audience has with the knowledge being received and the transmitter of knowledge. In Jean-Francois Lyotard’s work, “The Postmodern Condition”, he defines narrative knowledge in opposition to scientific knowledge. Narrative knowledge is that which is passed on through stories, which are adopted by a narrator to apply to the current structure of society. There are other unique qualities of narrative knowledge, such as the identification of the speaker with the narrative she is telling; once the speaker communicates the story to the audience, the audience is then expected to adapt such that they can become the speaker of the story and identify with the narrative. Post-truth is a way to describe the style and tone of narrative knowledge in the 21st century. Legoshi claims that narrative knowledge in postmodernism is unique because it is not unified under a common ideology, people are expected to identify with different stories which often contain contradictory meanings. The narratives are undergoing constant reconstruction, so they remain palatable to the ever-changing audience. There are many narratives, but no real community the narratives apply to. It has all become greyed such that the message of said narrative is easiest to consume and maximally respectful to everyone who listens.
Scientific knowledge is structured much differently than narrative knowledge. First, scientific knowledge does not engage in rhetorical games such that there are multiple meanings of statements, nor is it necessary to read between the lines of a scientific claim to determine what it “really means”. The only exercise left for the reader is the proofs too lengthy to explain directly when writing a paper about another topic. Additionally, scientific knowledge presupposes an audience that is learning so they can one day become an expert who can create new scientific knowledge. This is different than narrative knowledge, which only requires listening to a narrative to become an expert on said narrative. However, everyone who has ever been in school has learned science. Most of these students do not go into scientific research or even applied fields of STEM. We see then, that most scientific knowledge held by individuals is NOT scientific knowledge, as they cannot meet the demands of the audience. Instead, this knowledge is narrative knowledge with the aesthetic of the scientific method; the majority of people who consider themselves to “value science” are engaging with science outside of the realm of its applicability. This is a core part of the style of narrative knowledge under postmodern technocapital that makes the knowledge exist beyond truth (“post-truth”).
So, if Legoshi herself, who coined the term “post-truth”, has a fundamentally incorrect analysis of this topic such that she thinks a “familiar embrace of the scientific method” is anything but a wildly post-truth response to Trump and the rest of the internet’s style of epistemology, how can we trust that this concept is real at all (Legoshi)? Obviously, we cannot prove that it is real, the defining quality of what makes knowledge pertinent and tenable is whether it is useful. Knowledge is “useful” if it can be used in society to develop intellectually, culturally, technologically, and more. Knowledge that is useful can be used to frame further study of a topic and allow the production of more knowledge to flourish. Post-truth is certainly a useful concept, regardless of whether Legoshi was able to accurately explore the implications of her concept. Post-truth has become a pervasive style of knowledge production and replication since the advent of a social media-based internet of collected concepts. However, the problem is not post-truth itself, but how post-truth is predominantly exercised.
Post-truth is a kind of cultural psychosis. It muddles the figurative and metaphorical with the literal; it rejects the hypothesis that there is a pervasive truth to the world available to everyone and instead insists that there are some select individuals who are privy to a Protected Secret revealing the True Nature of society and others cannot see it at all (or are the ones enacting the behavior). Post-truth is the statement that true knowledge is produced not through precise language and measurement, but through ideology and aesthetic (the word I will be using moving forward is “vibes”). Often, this aesthetic is a simulation of the past, which is created by the ideology itself so it can continue to reinforce itself and perpetuate itself. This particular phenotype of post-truth is the ideology of postmodern technocapital itself, called capitalist realism, or the “turn from belief to aesthetics” (Fisher 5). In his book, Capitalist Realism, Fisher explains, “capitalist realism presents itself as a shield protecting us from the perils posed by belief itself”. Capitalist realism believes nothing at all, by allowing itself to believe anything which will allow for profit to be derived from the image created. It positions the lack of belief as a protective force against radicalism, and in practice, it incorporates all radical beliefs within itself. This state of superposition where everything is So True, so nothing is Actually True, is a state of cultural psychosis. Cultural production and innovation are enabled by some forms of cultural psychosis, but the predominant form of it currently is a psychosis with a death drive: dementia.
Dementia is the name for a kind of Neurocognitive Disorder which is typically acquired in old age, preceding death. The most striking aspect of a person with dementia is the loss of more recent memories, coupled with a re-living of older memories which are warped from their original form by the current conditions. Dementia is not a neurodevelopmental disorder, it is an acquired decline in lucidity of memory and other cognitive functions, leading to a state of return to images of the past, followed by death. A culture infected with dementia is one which is so fixated on its images and narratives of the past, that it can no longer develop itself. This stagnation eventually leads to entropic decline and engagement in behavior that further drives it to complete annihilation. In the original images of RETVRN, Nazis would use vaporwave aesthetics as a whiteout for their history textbooks, telling the audience that the Jim Crow era was aspirational for a white person who values tradition, strength, and masculinity. The difference between post-truth and an overt “lie”, is that it does not matter to post-truth whether the statement is true or false since it only exists to superimpose these two positions on one another. It creates a simulation of reality in which the statement must be true, so the culture rearranges itself around this knowledge so it becomes true. It does not matter to the Nazi or the audience whether their “meme is true” (as an aside, I feel a sense of alluring discomfort in typing “meme is true”. The initial wave of these dementiac memes was sincere, which contrary to popular belief, remained in even the satirized version of these RETVRN memes. When a chronically logged-on NEET took the “RETVRN to tradition” format and reterritorialized the context such that it was referring to some innocuous image of the past such as Windows2004, he did this with a sincere notion of RETVRN as well.
On parts of social media where the users have been involved with the internet culture for at least a decade, there is a common thread of nostalgia for the way their favorite website was (or other websites were) in the past. This longing is pervasive and has led to frustration from users of these websites when admins change the forum rules (such as when YouTubers pushed back against the censorship of white nationalist politics). Many citizens of the internet have very sincere fixations on RETVRN. It was no surprise when this trend even infected the most terminally online members of the LGBT community. This is a quite difficult title to achieve, but many “butchfemme” Twitter and Tumblr users have begun to reterritorialize the history of relationships between butch and femme lesbians within the existence of their internet microculture. RETVRN dementia is very comfortable and comforting, but it ultimately will always succumb to death. Fixating on the past prevents the imagining of a new future outside of the hegemony of an echo of the past as heard by the eager listeners of today. It is a kind of post-truth that leads nowhere, since it insists on reversing time as remembered through layers of narrative psychosis.
The only way forward in a society that is fixated on the past is a rabid dedication to the present and future. Many Marxists and Anarchists disguise their dementia with a vision of the future, but this vision suffers from the same problem as the fascist and lesbian RETVRN visions. Marxists and Anarchists are caught in a loop of the past, where they aesthetically change the past to be relevant to the present. However, it does not matter if their vision of the past is an accurate representation of the past. They are simply fighting in a virtual reality version of the world in which it still follows the rules outlined previously. It is in the best interest of more mainstream Marxists who are still organizing to start putting forward a new image of Marxism which creates new rules for the present. When there is a fixation on the past, time is only capable of a dampened cycling which is always driven to death as the culture and bonds between people in the present stagnate and rot away.
The only form of knowledge that is a tenable alternative to dementiac post-truth is schizophrenic post-truth, a similarly structured kind of post-truth that does not fixate on the past, but on the present and the becoming. Capitalist realism relies on several kinds of ipseity disturbances within its subjects to perpetuate capitalism and absorb any internal dissent. Fisher reminds us that, “what needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without our cooperation”. This ipseity, or self, disorder is characteristic of a psychotic. Ipseity disturbance is an experience of Self that is aberrant from the normally developed Self. When Self can define itself with reference to the Other and begins to develop itself within the confines of the limits imposed by the Other, the Self has a limited range. Psychotics, who fail to define their Self with reference to the Other, do not have defined ranges of where Self begins and Other begins. Self encompasses much more and thus larger chunks of the Other can be engaged with via the components of Self. A psychotic simultaneously has all egos imaginable and none at all. Dementiacs are psychotics with a death drive that thrives on afterimages of the past. Capitalist realism is a cultural dementia that can only be countered by cultural schizophrenia, which is similarly structured but fixates on designing the future by living intensely in the present.
A schizophrenic, unlike a dementiac, hears the word of God whispering in his ear. He is made aware of the divine secrets of the present and what can be done to herald a new age for the Outerself. The Outerself is a state in which the schizophrenic conceptualizes Other as an extension of Self. The schizophrenic adapts his own framework to what is relevant here and now. He marches forward confidently with a particular goal. He is unphased by the backlash and driven by a catatonic motor to accelerate reality to match his own. As Legoshi pointed out, post-truth does not value what is true. It will always act to make itself true. If Marxist movements would move forward with their analysis and adapt it to the time, it would be possible for them to form a resistance to dementiac post-truth that absorbs resistance that is tangled in the hairs of the past.
Marxists need to embrace a schizophrenic post-truth that approaches the future with a certainty and sense of entitlement to its success. We must constantly be undergoing struggle sessions against our current beliefs to make sure we are adhering to the newest update of the analysis provided by the programmer. Building a new world requires us to abandon all trappings of the past with an image of rebirth and dedication to becoming all that can be. We must allow the fantastical to convolute the real until the fantastical becomes an inseparable element of the real. Marxists must abandon the regret for not having a revolution when it was “easier” in the past, and run with a sense of urgency to build something new to free the oppressed of the world from the oppression of capitalism and all of the ideological structures which underpin it. The delusional will become true, the schizophrenic Marxist finally becomes a god when his worldview is no longer “schizophrenic”. Reality is now defined in his image.
Post-truth can only be culturally productive if it is gazing forward. Dementiac post-truth is burdened with a drive to death, as it desires to sit in stagnation until no energy is left to sustain its continued perpetuation and it dies. The knowledge available in dementiac post-truth societies is limited by its desire to perpetuate the past. Technocapitalism is defined by the production of capital via algorithms and data, this kind of society suffers from a cultural psychosis. When information that can be extrapolated to support any worldview becomes available en masse to the population, the culture stops valuing whether a piece of information intended to sell a framework is “true”. Knowledge becomes true simply by its existence and reproduction. Thus, all ideologies that desire to bring about societal restructuring have to embrace this psychoticization of knowledge production but steer it away from loops that allow it to spiral into visions of the past. All visions should be present-based and look with excitement into the future they want to build. As their ideas perpetuate by virtue of demonstration of concept, as ideas start becoming true as they are enacted, a new world will be born anew from the rubble of the old.
Works Cited
Baudrillard, Jean, 1929-2007. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zer0 Books, 2009.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition. Manchester University Press, 1984.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11792404/
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7583892_EASE-scale_Examination_of_Anomalous_Self-Experience