In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Jay Gupta, Mark Kelly, and Tim Luke about the changing character of the public sphere. Their wide-ranging conversation covers a number of topics, including the ways that social media has fragmented the public sphere into separate echo chambers; how the internet has contributed to an insurgent populism around the world and the efforts by traditional stakeholders to shut it down; the atrophy of the value of truth and the dominance of “bullshit” in the Trump era; the extent to which moral earnestness preserves an aspiration to truthfulness; Trumpism and the critique of society as controlled by unaccountable New Class elites; the ongoing Trumpification of the Republican Party; and the conflation versus the interpenetration of elitism and expertise. Telos 195 (Summer 2021) features a forum on the public sphere with articles by Gupta, Kelly, and Luke, excerpts of which appear here. Read the full articles at the Telos Online website (subscription required). To learn how your university can subscribe to Telos, visit our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 195 are available for purchase in our online store.
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The following commentary is based on a text that appeared originally in German in Junge Freiheit. An English translation of the interview with Hans-Georg Maaßen in Die Weltwoche has been posted separately today in TelosScope, here. The interview with Hans-Georg Maaßen documents his reactions toward the charge of anti-Semitism against him by several German media outlets in the last few weeks since he announced his candidacy for the German Bundestag. The controversy has revealed more about the deterioration of the German media landscape than about Maaßen’s own views and character. Spurred on by a charge against him of racism and anti-Semitism by climate activist Luisa Neubauer on ARD’s political talk show Anna Will, media outlets scoured Maaßen’s writings with the hope of giving their accusations some substance. The dearth of the evidence against him led them in the end to an article that he published with Johannes Eisleben in English in TelosScope. But rather than engaging with the specific arguments of the article, the commentators have engaged in a kind of witch hunt. The following interview appeared originally in German in Die Weltwoche on June 18, 2021. Translated into English by Xuxu Song. A separate commentary by David Pan appears here. Hans-Georg Maaßen, President of Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution from 2012 to 2018, is accused of spreading anti-Semitic ideas. The accusation comes from the milieu of the “Fridays for Future” movement. The timing, Maaßen suspects, is no coincidence and has nothing to do with the political climate. Rather, they want to prevent his election as a member of the Bundestag. Michel Foucault’s name has never been far from scandal. Indeed, he has proven to be a perennially controversial figure. He rose to prominence in controversy, his ponderously scholarly 1966 book The Order of Things becoming a bestseller because marginal denunciations of humanism and Marxism therein brought it massive publicity in the form of shrill denunciations by elements of the French intellectual establishment. As Foucault himself wryly noted, he has been denounced by conservatives as an agent of the KGB and by communists as an agent of the CIA. I would suggest that this phenomenon is related to the disturbingness of Foucault’s analyses: as long as Foucault’s conclusions remain difficult for people to cognize, there will always be an attempt to dismiss them for ad hominem reasons. Since one cannot libel the dead, there has effectively been open slather for accusations against Foucault, no matter how baseless, for almost four decades. After his death, it was alleged that Foucault had deliberately spread the virus, HIV, that had killed him, an accusation that hardly made sense given the state of knowledge about the virus at the time he died. In the opening two decades of the third millennium, the period of my career as a Foucault scholar, the dominant scandal narrative around Foucault has shifted twice. During the first decade, the period of the War on Terror, the great scandal was Foucault’s support for the Islamic Revolution in Iran, which was always interpreted baselessly to mean Foucault had endorsed the theocratic regime that was its ultimate result. During this period any public seminar or event on Foucault would seem to be attended by an audience member who would rise to denounce Foucault’s supposed sympathy for Islamism. The great scandal for the following decade was Foucault’s alleged support of neoliberalism, provoked by the publication of Foucault’s lectures on this topic, The Birth of Biopolitics, in English in 2008. The coordinates of this controversy were quite different from the others in that a number of serious Foucault scholars agreed with the allegations from a sympathetic standpoint, though I nonetheless maintain they were ultimately without foundation. To read more in depth from Telos, subscribe to the journal here. On January 31, 1920, Dr. Bhimrao “Babasaheb” Ambedkar—lawyer, thought leader, social thinker, and one of Columbia University’s most famous alumni, who later became the prime architect of the constitution of the postcolonial Republic of India—published the first issue of the Dalit newspaper Mooknayak (The Silent or Muted Hero). The aim was to create, in the Marathi language, an alternative narrative of self-representation of Dalits (then called “untouchables”) to counter the caste-biased local vernacular and colonial English-language newspapers in pre-independence India. Under Dr. Ambedkar’s leadership, and often led by his editorials, Mooknayak quickly turned into a megaphone for those who were consciously being silenced by those in power, a platform to champion the rights and dignity of the oppressed and impoverished lowest castes. The idea was effective: through Mooknayak, those who were marginalized and minoritized were able to leave a paper trail of their accounts, their struggles for dignity, hope, and rights for the next generations to come. On December 18, 2020, at the end of a year marred by the global COVID-19 pandemic, during which a shadow pandemic exposed the socio-economic divisions and the differences between the mainstream and the marginalized across the world, the most befitting centennial tribute to the spirit of Babasaheb’s Mooknayak came through the publication of Trolley Times, a self-published newspaper of the Indian farmers’ movement. The paper drew its title from the trolleys (trailers) hitched to a tractor or a truck that have become the temporary abodes of thousands of farmers protesting at the borders of New Delhi since November 2020. The genesis of this newspaper is as extraordinary as its founding team, comprising a freelance journalist, a filmmaker, a documentary photo artist, and a physical therapist and farmer. Launched bilingually in Punjabi and Hindi with a first printing of 2,000 copies that quickly grew to 10,000 in the subsequent editions, Trolley Times established itself as a very important space for the narrative self-representation of the political and cultural spirit that is the driving force of the ongoing Indian farmers’ movement. With the digital presence of this newspaper on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and more recently through online English translations of its issues, it is hardly surprising that Bloomberg called it the “fastest growing newspaper in India today.” In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with Steven Knepper and Robert Wyllie about their article “In the Swarm of Byung-Chul Han,” from Telos 191 (Summer 2020). An excerpt of the article appears here. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Purchase a print copy of Telos 191 in our online store. |
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