Fact versus feeling: What post-truth scholarship can learn from the feminist phenomenology of affect

Psychoanalytic inspiration: Symptoms, solutions, bodies

My inspiration for undertaking this project began a few years ago when I noticed the many similarities between the post-factual attitude and the psychoanalytic category of paranoid psychosis. In this, I followed in the footsteps of Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 article in Harper’s Magazine, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which makes a comparison between political attitudes in America at the height of McCarthyism and psychoanalytic accounts of paranoia. For my part, I was struck by the way that descriptions of post-factuality echo the analysis of paranoid patients. In both cases, we witness a loss of shared reality that makes communication between subjects deeply problematic (Leader 2011, 105–106). Likewise, we see the presence in both cases of intractable stories that are immune to counter-evidence (ibid, 85) and the sense that others cannot be trusted—both the paranoid subject and the post-truther feel that only they really know the truth that is being hidden or obfuscated by people in power with nefarious motives (ibid, 79). ⁵

Exploring this connection through the psychoanalytic lens led me to alter my attitude towards post-factuality. While the prominent discourse about psychosis in therapeutic literature frames the symptoms of the illness as problems that need to be solved, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis takes a different approach. They view the symptoms of illness, instead, as attempts at solutions to the deeper problems of their patients. Freud says that delusion in paranoia “which we take to be the pathological product, is in reality an attempt at recovery, a process of reconstruction” (Freud 2001, 71). Modern psychoanalytic scholars of psychosis such as Darian Leader, Paul Moyaert, and Stijn Vanheule have made this more creative interpretation of the symptom the cornerstone of their analysis of paranoia. ⁶ What would it mean to look at the “symptoms” of post-factuality through a similar lens? If the post-truth attitude is an attempt to solve a problem, what is that problem?

In the seminal case of Daniel Paul Schreber, an Austrian judge who suffered from paranoia and whose memoirs were analyzed by Freud, the germinating source of delusion was the body. ⁷ Schreber’s illness begins with an awareness that something is happening in his body that did not originate with him. He feels different. There is a “zone of intensity” across his chest (Deleuze and Guattari 2003, 19); he hallucinates that his penis is shrinking, that his stomach is removed for periods of time, that he lost whole lobes of his lungs, his ribs are smashed, and that his intestines are torn (Schreber 2000, 142–145). It is here, in his flesh, that his illness begins to take shape.

Schreber then sets to work to make sense of these bodily sensations and situates them in delusions of increasingly megalomaniacal scope. At first, he is convinced that his body and soul are being medically invaded by his doctor, Flechsig, whom he believes wishes to turn him into a woman in order to sexually abuse him. His Flechsig delusion is then folded into a grander religious one in which he comes to realize that he has a special relationship to God, whose creative rays he can attract into his body in states of extreme physical excitation (ibid, 62). Flechsig’s sexual plan is a means of cutting Schreber off from these rays by reducing him to a “lesser,” sexual being and thereby “murdering” his soul (ibid, 33). In the final stage of his delusion, Schreber accepts his transformation into a female because he believes it is his destiny to couple with God and give birth to a new race of human beings (Freud 2001, 20–21).

The paranoid body’s experience is a constant motivating force in the movement of its illness. These sensations shape the sense he has of his own bodily boundaries and the way the world and people in it show up to him, as either threatening or allies in his struggle. Beneath the details of the psychoanalytic interpretation of Schreber’s illness, therefore, is an observation about the way that the body experiences its own vulnerability and the feelings of fear, antagonism, and distrust that it engenders. Could a similar affective bodily experience underlie our post-factual attitude, is it shared, and is there a philosophical way of uncovering it?

Is emotion a shared object of phenomenological experience?

The phenomenological method purports to allow lived experience to show up to us as it is in itself without presuppositions and is, therefore, a promising means of uncovering any affects associated with the post-truth attitude. The worry for a traditional phenomenology of emotions, however, is related to the so-called problem of other minds. The history of philosophy has often presented emotions as radically private. According to this view, the same event can engender completely different emotions in every person who experiences it. A crowded lecture hall is the perfect example of this. As a professor, I care what my students feel in my classroom, not just because I want to be liked but also because I know that I can do my job better if I know where my students are. If they feel intimidated, then I would be able to educate them better if I adjust my behavior to make them more comfortable. That will likely motivate them to ask more questions, better understand the material, and create a more engaging classroom environment. The difficulty is that it seems I can never know what they are feeling unless they tell me—and anyone with students knows that they are not apt to publicly criticize their teachers. My students’ emotions are private and this is always a potential source of anxiety for me (Sartre 1943, 306).

For a phenomenology of post-factual affect to be culturally and transcendentally relevant, that affect must, first, be available as an object of description and, second, be more than a catalog of radically subjective feelings. Instead, it would need to be able to pick out and describe the prevalent mood shared across the members of the post-factual culture. If traditional phenomenology is right, however, it is difficult to speak of shared emotions and even more difficult to ratify the similarity of affect between two people if the experience of those feelings is radically private. If this were the case, then our analysis of post-truth as an affective phenomenon would be truncated. We would be left with a post-factual emotional relativism running in tandem with an epistemic one: we would each have our “own feelings” just as we are said to have our “own truth” (Budgeon 2021, 259).

The phenomenology of the body, however, offers an alternative approach to understanding emotion. It takes issue with what it calls an overly ‘intellectualistic’ view of consciousness. Husserl may have launched phenomenology with an epistemological question about the conditions of possibility of knowledge, but this led him to explore the insight that knowledge is always based on perception. The relationship the subject has to perception, therefore, is primary: it constitutes a field that we can, in turn, analyze scientifically or intellectually in a laboratory or in an epistemology seminar—one has to first perceive snow, for instance, before one can study it, and the same would go for the emotions we feel (Merleau-Ponty 2012, xxii).

Merleau-Ponty takes this insight a step further in his Phenomenology of Perception. According to him, the key to uncovering the experience of perception is to pay attention to the body’s role in it. Merleau-Ponty’s new focus leads him to conclude that consciousness cannot be equated with the thinking thing of rationalism; instead, consciousness is primarily something that we do: it is a way of relating to the world through movement and flesh that makes things show up as meaningful to us (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 113).

Merleau-Ponty inverts the traditional mind-body hierarchy: he positions the body rather than the thinking mind as the greater source of “knowledge”—a kind of “knowledge” often referred to by less cognitive language such as “know-how” or “grasp” to distinguish it from its intellectual counterpart. What it means to say that the body “grasps” the world is that it knows how to move in order to see, hear, taste, use, and differentiate between the objects around it. In most cases, this happens without its savvy being translated into a formal, intellectual knowledge that it trots out in words, graphs, or formulae (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 145). Think, for instance, of the way that we are able to sing along with a song on the radio. How do our vocal chords know how to make the same sound and find the same pitch as the disembodied voices and instruments coming from the speakers? My intellectual mind is certainly in the dark about how I do this. My body is simply able to tune in and join in—albeit often badly.

Once we turn our attention to the body as a site of consciousness, the solipsistic view of emotions becomes untenable. If consciousness is the body in movement rather than a disembodied thinking activity, then every act of consciousness is somehow registered in my flesh as movement (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 369). In the final chapters of Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty turns to the problem of other minds and argues that since our feelings are not hidden in a disembodied consciousness, then they are actually public phenomena. What is more, they are not felt in isolation (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 366). Think, for instance, of what it is like to witness an angry outburst through the window of an adjacent subway car. Even though the person is a stranger and I cannot hear the words they are saying, my body immediately registers what it is seeing as rage without having to go through a process of explicit deduction based on evidence from the stranger’s facial expressions and bodily movements. My body, along with the bodies of those around me, immediately feels the rage in the stranger’s body and responds in turn. We make ourselves a bit smaller by hunching down or gathering our handbags on our laps; we stop our conversations; we divert our eyes. The stranger’s feeling is not a mystery to me and it is not contained “over there” in their body; it is felt here, in my own body. It is a shared experience. ⁸

The “sensationalism” of post-factuality

Feminist philosophers have continued Merleau-Ponty’s work on emotion because, as Sara Ahmed puts it, feminism is itself “sensational.” In Living a Feminist Life, she deconstructs this term and offers an analysis of the many ways that it can be mined to help us interpret feminism. Fundamentally, Ahmed argues, feminism is a kind of intentional attitude one can take up with respect to the world that makes it show up differently: as a site of deep, systemic inequality (Ahmed 2017, 41). As she describes it, feminism is a kind of phenomenological reduction, which results in a “wonder” of the kind that Merleau-Ponty first described (Ahmed 2017, 41; Merleau-Ponty 2012, xxvii) that makes us see things that had previously been invisible to us.

The feminist reduction, as I will call it, suddenly makes the subject who performs it able to see evidence of oppression everywhere. After taking up the feminist attitude, for instance, the experience of classic films is completely different. It is hard to imagine how an audience might once have appreciated films like Rear Window and even viewed the relationship between the protagonist, Jeff, and his girlfriend, Lisa, as romantic. In the film, Lisa, who is the embodiment of a stereotypically feminine version of success, is presented as having to win Jeff over; Jeff, on the other hand, is completely indifferent to her despite her having romantic dinners delivered to his house, showering him with affection, and offering him lucrative job opportunities. After being rejected by him, Lisa returns to Jeff and asks him: “how far does a girl have to go before you notice her?” and Jeff answers, “well, if she’s pretty enough, she doesn’t have to go anywhere. She just has to be” (Hitchcock 1954, 44:16). It is hard to hear dialog like this and not bristle, but, as Ahmed points out, drawing attention to the misogyny of this scene often provokes eye-rolls and accusations of “creating problems” where there are none (Ahmed 2017, 38–39).

Feminism, however, is more than the attitude that allows gender and sex inequalities to show up to us in a way that they never did before. The feminist attitude, she argues, begins with the body. It is something that is sensed before it is named or theorized (Ahmed 2017, 22). A young girl’s first encounter with inequity or the male gaze, she says, is felt as something that is ‘not right’ (ibid, 22). This experience is often experienced as a kind of intrusion into her body that is overwhelming: a touch, or a look, or a comment that is unwelcome and so powerful that it changes the way that the feminized body takes up space going forward. As Iris Marion Young famously noted, feminized bodies are careful, inhibited bodies (Young 1980, 142–143). Theirs are bodies in anticipation - sensitive to any hint of potential violence (Ahmed 2017, 25).

From outside of the perspective of the “feminist reduction,” however, the experiences and inequalities that feminists notice and speak are hidden or even invisible. As Ahmed puts it: “to be a feminist can feel like being in a different world even when you are seated at the same table” (Ahmed 2017, 40). The question of why systemic inequality is invisible to those who have not done the “feminist reduction” is a complicated one that largely exceeds the scope of this paper. Ahmed herself offers various explanations from inertia and resistance to fear of punishment in Living a Feminist Life. Perhaps, the most compelling argument for the invisibility of patriarchy is a version of the argument that Ahmed and other critical race theorists make about whiteness: like whiteness and privilege, patriarchy is the “default” orientation in this world (Ahmed 2006, 121; McIntosh 2019).

Because inequality is invisible to most people, feminism can often appear to be exaggerated and unwelcome. Ahmed describes her own experiences of being labeled a “killjoy” by her family for drawing attention to the plight of women at the dinner table (Ahmed 2017, 37). This is another sense in which feminism relates to sensation: to the uninitiated, it often shows up as a form of sensationalism championed by overly emotional people (ibid, 38).

We can make a parallel with the attitudes towards post-truth here. Post-truth, like feminism, is also described as a form of sensationalism. In his book, Post-Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back, journalist Matthew D’Ancona argues that the post-truth attitude stems from the human attachment to dramatic narratives. In his view, we more easily understand and connect with exciting stories than facts. He claims that post-truth narratives are like myths that connect with people on a visceral level that, like a movie on Netflix, is more understandable and compelling than complex facts and statistics or theories put forward by experts using words that are difficult to understand (D’Ancona 2017, 15). A conspiracy theory about the government using the COVID-19 vaccine as part of a covert plan to microchip and monitor the population, for example, is much more exciting even than the imperfect and politically messy attempt to stem a global pandemic. As he sees it, the post-factual attitude is a product of our desire to be entertained and of our boredom with dry, difficult to understand facts.

Viewed through Ahmed’s feminist analysis of sensationalism, D’Ancona’s language in his description of the post-truth attitude takes on a more patriarchal valence. It begins to echo the logic that once marketed soap operas with dramatic and improbable plotlines exclusively to women working in the home in the mid-twentieth century (Brundson 1995, 60). If, as Ahmed reminds us, there is a deeper, transcendental dimension behind the appearance of sensationalism as it relates to feminism, could there be a similar transcendental truth to uncover behind the way that post-truth shows up that we are missing because we have taken up the wrong attitude towards it? What are the sensations or emotions that undergird the post-truth attitude as a condition of possibility?

Revisiting the definition of post-truth

The feminist phenomenology of affect goes beyond merely viewing emotion as something that is a shared object of embodied experience. It also teaches us to challenge the idea that affect is a response to a situation. According to Ahmed, emotion is a condition of possibility for any experience whatsoever. Take, for instance, the experience of a threatening object, such as a comet hurtling towards the earth. The common-sense account claims that the comet would occasion in me a feeling of fear. According to Ahmed, however, the order of things is quite the contrary: the emotion of fear is what makes things like ‘me’ and ‘comet’ stand out in the way that they do as threatening or as threatened (Ahmed 2004, 52).

The phenomenological groundwork for this analysis of emotion comes from Heidegger and Sartre, who spoke of emotion as a kind of mood that shapes our experience of the world rather than a feeling we attend to. The German word for mood, “Stimmung,” also means “tuning.” Mood, according to this analysis, is like a radio dial that, depending on its frequency, allows us to “tune in” to some things rather than others (Heidegger 1962, 176). Sartre develops this idea more fully in his Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions. In his words, emotions are a “transformation” of the world (Sartre 1948, 33). They change the sense of what shows up to us. To illustrate this, he asks us to imagine, for instance, the way that an emotion such as discouragement changes our experience of picking grapes. Initially, the bunch of grapes hanging on the vine before us appears to us as delicious and to-be-picked. We get a ladder, climb to the top rung, and reach out but we cannot reach the bushel. We become frustrated, disappointed. In this moment, the grapes show up differently. We see that they are actually too unripe to be plucked and we resign ourselves to them being out of reach (ibid, 34).

Sartre and Heidegger’s phenomenological analyses famously underplayed the body’s constitutive role in experience. Ahmed, therefore, reframes their shared insight in terms of Merleau-Ponty’s concept of motor intentionality discussed above. Emotion, on her view, is fundamentally a movement the body makes or a position it takes up in space. The distinctive motions associated with hate, for instance, are turning away and inhibition. When the body takes up a hating position, Ahmed argues, it turns away from something that it perceives to have caused pain or injury or threatened its very identity. Ahmed calls up Audre Lorde’s description of sitting next to a white woman on a subway car in Harlem to illustrate this. The white woman tightens and shifts away from the place where the girl is sitting. She gathers her fur coat close to her so as not to touch Lorde’s Black body. This movement, in turn, has an impact on the space Lorde’s body takes up and how it views itself. The little girl now sees herself differently. She looks at her body and sees it as Black. She feels crushed by the woman’s hate. She makes herself smaller. She carries this forward. She no longer moves around the world in the same way (Ahmed 2004, 53–58).

In this chapter, I set out to explore some of the mistakes that philosophers have made when it comes to the role of emotion in order to avoid transposing them into an analysis of post-truth. The long-standing tradition within philosophy pits emotion against reason in the epistemological arena as a source of delusion or distraction from the truth. The feminist approach to emotion in phenomenology gives us an occasion to understand the role of feelings in the post-factual attitude differently. The often-cited definition of post-truth from the Oxford English Dictionary claims that it is an attitude in which we prefer emotions to facts, as though the two things existed as objects to be encountered on the same transcendental plane and can be chosen one over the other. Emotions, Ahmed reminds us, are first and foremost intentional attitudes rather than objects of analysis—they are the way that we relate to things that constitute the way things appear. They are best analyzed on a deeper transcendental level than the factual objects of our everyday experience which themselves ground the higher-order epistemological claims we make about them. In Ahmed’s words, “bodies of [emotion] don’t operate on the terrain of truth, they operate to make and unmake worlds” (Ahmed 2004, 59).

The philosophical analysis of affect is steeped in a history of misogyny. It has presented emotion as radically private and sensational—something that interferes with our ability to know rather than what makes knowledge possible. The early scholarship on post-truth has framed the role of emotion in a similar way. This is disconcerting. Doing a phenomenology of post-truth means grappling with the traces of anti-feminist attitudes that still linger in our philosophical analyses and prevent us from seeing the things themselves. The feminist phenomenology of the body and the psychoanalytic exploration of affective disturbances reveals that emotions are shared transcendental ways of relating to the world that precede our theoretical knowledge of it. They do not interfere with knowledge but rather make it possible. If this is accurate, then post-truth scholars should give emotion a more primordial status in their analysis than they have until now.

ORCID iD

Erica Harris https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3838-1991