Democratic institutions are at risk. I am thinking of recent events in the UK.
Following the court decisions on the prorogation of Parliament, there were hostile accusations against both Parliament and the judiciary.
There are extreme right wing forces gathering, using similar tactics and chipping away... — Amity

I assume that in the US, there is the process quite similar to what is going on in the UK. Recently, the GOP Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has accused Nancy Pelosi that she started impeachment against Trump in an unconstitutional manner. Should we consider it as a fascistic or proto-fascistic attack against a democratic institution?

who are the 'elites' ? Parliamentarians, the representatives, are supposed to speak for the electorate.They are being attacked by another kind of 'elite' within; the lying, extremist Tory who pretend to speak for the people. — Amity

Probably, it is difficult to single out a group that has a monopoly on
a prevailing agenda. (That is why the appearence of Trump, or "the lying, extremist Tory" looks like the "tectonic shift"). A conglomerate of leading parliamentarians, journalists, and intellectuals speaks a dominating discourse through the medium and censorship of the contemporary mass media. This situation has cardinally transformed the fundamental relations between the field of a public political discourse and so-called “real facts.” It is worth to come back to Timothy Snyder’s claim that differently from the rest of politicians,
Trump never refers to “real facts".

objective, academic analysis as explained here:

5 min Ch4 interview related to the fragility of democracy. Yale professor Timothy Snyder :

https://www.channel4.com/news/some-of-todays-politicians-have-learned-propaganda-tricks-from-1930s-fascists-says-yale-professor — Amity

It looks like Snyder mistakenly substitutes the status of a “fact” in scientific research for the use of a “fact” in contemporary politics. Any fact, spoken by a politician and taken by mass media, loses its character of an index of the apparent and transparent truth. It can be immediately challenged by a counter fact, replaced by an adjacent fact, distorted by a fact from a different area, shifted to a conflicting context, and/or confronted by a hostile, affectively charged commentary.

This from StreetlightX :
"Less than a day after President Donald Trump bragged to supporters at a campaign-style rally in Minnesota Thursday that he was working hard to bring U.S. soldiers home from foreign wars, the Pentagon announced Friday that 1,800 troops and advanced weapons systems have been ordered to Saudi Arabia"

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/10/11/less-24-hours-after-saying-time-bring-em-home-trump-orders-1800-us-troops-saudi

The question is: does it even matter to his core voters ? Do they even see that they are being played ? — Amity

Anyway, Trump still can say that he ordered to withdraw troops from an immediate
warfare area in Syria while sending them to relatively calm Saudi Arabia. Further, Trump could claim that his administration has initiated a process of withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan. So, a Trump supporter could agree with his claim: “We are slowly going away from the Middle East,” while a Trump hater could rightly accuse him of lying.

From the OP. How many posters actually watched the 'Deplorables' ? — Amity

The main point of the video is against efforts to represent Trump’s voters and brexiters as deplorable, unspeakable, racist, xenophobic, etc. Also, according to the video, the political establishment has lost its touch with the vast masses of ordinary people in the US and the UK. So, elites have stopped to express the masses’ concerns. Bat mass does not speak itself; it speaks through its representatives. Does Trump speak on behalf of its base? Does he speak what it wants to hear? If it is correct, there is an apparent controversy between what we see in the video and the numerous accounts of Trump. Because if they are correct, we should agree that Trump’s base is comprised of the deplorable and unspeakable.

In his first campaign stop since the inquiry was announced, the US president and a 20,000-capacity crowd staged a formidable show of defiance at a basketball arena in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Trump mesmerised his fans for 102 minutes with a verbal cannon of conspiracy theories, blatant falsehoods, profane insults and anti-refugee bigotry.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/11/trump-minneapolis-rally-biden — David Smith

This account of Trump’s rally confirms that his base is indeed comprised of deplorable and “unspeakable” people. “Trump mesmerised his fans for 102 minutes with a verbal cannon of conspiracy theories, blatant falsehoods, profane insults, and anti-refugee bigotry” - Trump speaks what his rally wants to hear, and he speaks on behalf of it. Farther, he could expand his discourse far beyond this particular rally. Probably, so far, this change has been the central part of the so-called “tectonic shift” of Trump’s presidency. All allegations of fascistic transformations, and of destroying democratic institutions have not been verified yet.

academic analysis as explained here:

5 min Ch4 interview related to the fragility of democracy. Yale professor Timothy Snyder :

https://www.channel4.com/news/some-of-todays-politicians-have-learned-propaganda-tricks-from-1930s-fascists-says-yale-professor — Amity

It is an interesting attempt to understand Trump’s phenomenon. In Germany, the fascistic body politic had been constituted so that the body, the intellect, the affection, and even the mimics of the fuhrer had embodied the German masses’ desires, aspirations, and hopes. The individuals’ anxieties, emotions, traumatic experiences, and fantasies had been mobilized and transformed. Is that possible to apply this account on one of the main aspects of fascism to the relations between Trump and his supporters? Trump could establish a unique channel of immediate communication with a vast audience, trying to address its concerns and appeal to its interests. Should Trump’s proximity to his voters be categorized as the fascistic or proto-fascistic body politic that threatens to destroy the existing political regime? And, does Trump’s base constitute the hysteric mass, subordinated to the irrational impulses of the maniacal leader?

In a world where identity is properly understood — TheWillowOfDarkness

Jordan Peterson claims that the term of identity should not be overused; he insists that the gender identities under the question should have been constructed through the continuous and long-term of social construction:
“To refuse to engage in the social aspect of identity negotiation — to insist that what you say you are is what everyone must accept — is simply to confuse yourself and everyone else (as no one at all understands the rules of your game, not least because they have not yet been formulated).
The continually expanded plethora of “identities” recently constructed and provided with legal status thus consist of empty terms which (1) do not provide those who claim them with any real social role or direction; (2) confuse all who must deal with the narcissism of the claimant, as the only rule that can exist in the absence of painstakingly, voluntarily and mutually negotiated social role is “it’s morally wrong to say or do anything that hurts my feelings”; (3) risks generating psychological chaos among the vast majority of individuals exposed to the doctrines that insist that identity is essentially fluid and self-generating”.
One could reject Peterson’s arguments as too reactionary and obstructionistic, neglecting the essential rights of the oppressed group. Or, maybe he simply
cannot catch up with our fast-changing time?

If you read his essay on Epic vs Novel, he establishes a clear opposition between the closed monological world view of the epic and the problematized and dialogic world view of the great novels. — uncanni

I started to understand your OP better. It looks like that based on Bakhtin’s essay on Epic vs Novel, you tried to reconstruct the central theme of Bakhtin’s philosophy. But, even if we
assume that it was indeed the collision between dialogism and monologism, it is still not clear to what extent the dichotomy, grounded on comparing and contrasting the epical world view with the novels' one, can become a fruitful model for understanding our contemporary discursive realities. Even during Bakhtin’s own lifetime, the dominating forms of the monological – the Stalinist totalitarian discourse, as well as socialist realism literature, were quite different from the epical literary forms. Definitely, Bakhtin tried to undermine the prevailing enclosing oppressing discourses. Probably, his analyses of ordinary language may be more actual today than his literary criticism.
“However monological the utterance may be… it cannot but be in some measure,
a response to what has already been said about the given topic…The utterance is filled with dialogic overtone…After all, our thought itself – is born and shaped in the process of interaction and struggle with other thought…” (Bakhtin “The problem of speech genres”). Yet, however successful these strategies of opening and breaking through could be while confronting the soviet totalitarian regimes, they may not be effective today anymore.

“The word, directed toward its object, enters a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgments and accents, weaves in and out of compelx interrelationships, merges with some, recoils from others, itnersects with yet a third group: and all this may crucially shape discourse....The word is born in a dialogue as a living rejoinder within it; the word is shaped in dialogic interaction with an alien word that is already in the object.” — uncanni

There are so many contemporary ways of framing, enclosing the dialogical sphere. Tolerance, openness to Other’s word, advocated by Bakhtin, often has been incorporated into the already-made, enclosed discourse. Have borders between monological and dialogical become blurred and indiscernible?

I am sorry, I meant collision, not collusion. Anyway, my point is that Bakhtin’s
project was about the universality of dialogic relations so that any monological
would be essentially dialogical. It was not about the dichotomy:

Bakhtin's ideas about dialogism vs monologism. — uncanni

Next, I don’t think that Bakhtin intended to reduce his vision of the dialogic just to the literary, or imaginary world. Some critics propose that he discovered a new,
dialogical sphere of being, not limited to mere replies between speakers in a dialogue.

The quotation is from “Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics”; and "dialogic collision" is the proper translation – Bakhtin especially underscored “the violent intersection of a few voices” as the fundamental feature of consciousness of Dostoyevsky’s characters.

This is the fundamental question Bakhtin asks, in the most fundamental philosophical sense: Can I listen to difference with tolerance? — uncanni

Bakhtin's point is that there are dialogic strategies which open a space for broader mutual understanding, and monologic strategies that shut down the possibility of responding. — uncanni

Bakhtin's notion of dialogic relationships should not be reduced to a mere field of communication between interlocutors in a dialogue:
"Dialogic relationships are possible not only among whole (relatively
whole) utterances; a dialogic approach is possible toward any signifying
part of an utterance, even toward an individual word, if that
word is perceived not as the impersonal word of language but as a
sign of someone else's semantic position, as the representative of
another person's utterance; that is if we hear in it someone else's
voice. Thus dialogic relationships can permeate inside the utterance,
even inside the individual word, as long as two voices collide within it
dialogically."
According to Bakhtin, a dialogic relation plays an essential role in any verbal act, including inner speech. Even an internal monologue is addressed to someone or something; replies to someone or something.

“Communism has a rather orthodox definition including the abolition of private property, the cessation of class relations of domination, and the withering away of the state. Left-accelerationism [i.e. data democratization -SX] is a total non-starter on this issue for me because it remains a technocratic state socialist project rather than communist one. [One should] propose blocking, sabotage, and ungovernability as a shared exodus from an Empire that operates according to communication (the precise cybernetic system that left-accelerationists advocate). The speed of such revolt may actually be experienced as a slowing down, as the complicity between cybernetics and capitalism is that both speed things up because they perceive most problems to be an issue of efficiency.“

This would be a third option. Not ethics, not politics, just escape, inoperativity — StreetlightX

It is still not clear how Culp’s idea of escape (definitely Deleuzian) is related to his vision of communism. “Darkness advances the secret as an alternative to the liberal obsession with transparency…The conspiracy is against the consistency
of everything being in its proper place, and the secret is the fact that nothing is as it seems. It circulates as an open secret that retains its secrecy only by operating against connectivism through the principle of selective engagement…We all must live double lives”. (Andrew Culp, Dark Deleuze). Doubtfully, that such interpretation of Deleuze and Guattari’s insight of taking flight can ground Culp’s assumption that “Deleuze’s metaphysics suggests that there are non-legislative processes that could passively produce the conditions of communism.” To escape, or to take flight, does not necessarily mean to get read of any political or ethical responsibility in favour of the violent anarchistic deconstruction. The most immediate effect of the escape is the work of self by self,
self-subjectivation, created by folding. Can this work be considered as an action under our control?

We're all really bloody ethical now, super sensitive to the desires, wants, needs of the other (the corollary to this, one might say the mechanism for this, is shame, or weaponized shame: we shame those who are (deemed?) unethical on a literal global scale. — StreetlightX

The ubiquitous discourse of shame, taken up by the establishment, has become a part of totalizing strategies of closing the field of politics. As a consequence, independence of thought, autonomy, and the possibility of political opposition are being deprived of their basic spontaneity.

it might be only my consciousness, which comprises a very small part of my overall being, which is oriented toward the past. — Metaphysician Undercover

My consciousness can function just through its temporality, which
has existed as an organized structure. The three so-called dimensions of time: past, present, and future, should not be considered as a collection of isolated "givens." The only possible method by which to study temporality is to approach it as a totality, as an original synthesis, which dominates its secondary structures and which confers on them their meaning.

Recently, Judith Butler further developed her account on responsibility. She discussed various aspects of a question that Adorno posed: “Can one lead a good life
in a bad life?” Butler assumes that there are different modes of life involved here: my own life, “a good life” as a moral directive, and
”a bad life” as a vast complex of our social, economic, and biological living conditions. “The life I am living is already connected with broader networks of life…My own life depends on a life that is not mine, not just a life of the other, but a broader social and economic organization of life…They constitute who I am. If we might still think about what a good life might be, we can no longer think of it exclusively in terms of the good life of the individual”. (Butler, Notes Toward A Performative Theory Of Assembly). Sharing with Adorno the idea that the pursuit of the good life is possible just through resistance, Butler, nevertheless, stresses the importance of taking part in the protest collective actions. If my individuality is entirely determined by different regimes of power, just “radical democracy’s
movements can articulate what it might mean to lead a good life in the sense of a livable life.” Therefore, my personal responsibility is in becoming a part of an appropriate social movement struggle. Adorno himself proposed a different notion of responsibility and resistance. He thought that we are still able to create our own individual space: “This resistance to what the world has made of us does not imply merely an opposition to the external world…We ought also to mobilize our own powers of resistance in order to resist those parts of us that are tempted to join in.”
(Adorno, Minima Moralia).

sex, gender or sexual orientation is it's own fact about a person itself. A truth not given by properties (e.g. "I'm a man because I have a penis"), but rather one given in itself (e.g. "I am a man") which occurs alongside their properties (whatever those might be, be they a penis or a vagina, burly or scrawny, short hair or long, etc.) — TheWillowOfDarkness

What is the truth of belonging to identity itself? What kind of identity do you use here?
Do we need the principle of identity to define gender or sexual orientation? Butler claims that categories themselves, as products of regimes of power, produce the identity they are deemed to be simply representing.
"A genealogical critique refuses to search for the origins of
gender, the inner truth of female desire, a genuine or authentic
sexual identity that repression has kept from view; rather
genealogy investigates the political stakes in designating as
an origin and cause those identity categories that are in fact
the effects of institutions, practices, discourses with multiple
and diffuse points of origin."

Responsibility enters precisely at the point at which our actions exceed us. — StreetlightX

Doubtless, Butler and Arendt accounts of responsibility are correct. Nevertheless,
they are incomplete: Sartre laid out a different outlook on what is under our control. Each of our actions has two levels: the first one maintains our intimate tie with action, and what makes it our possibility is an ability to interrupt the action, stop ourselves. “This possibility of interrupting the action is rejected on a second level by the fact that the action which discovers itself to me through my act tends to crystallize as a transcendent, relatively independent form. The consciousness of man in action is non-reflective consciousness. It is consciousness of something, and the transcendent which discloses itself to this consciousness is of a particular nature: it is a structure of exigency in the world, and the world correlatively discloses in it complex relations of instrumentality”. While acting, we inevitably contain ourselves within the unforeseen chain of consequences, relations, or commitments, which are definitely out of our control. Yet, we are still responsible for our behavioral patterns. It does not mean that we have to make an explicit decision at every moment about how to behave. Instead, the ability to interrupt our actions manifests our control over the motives that we find ourselves within. The character, existing through our given or chosen projects, forms the motives.

A person can think about anything in a meaningful way. And they can also refrain from thinking about anything in a meaningful way. — Terrapin Station

Meaning is something mental that we do. Namely, it's the mental process of associative thinking, of thinking about something so that it implies, refers to, connotes, denotes, suggests or "pushes" or "leans towards", etc. other things. — Terrapin Station

When we have a dream – does it satisfy your definition of meaningful mental activity? Is it a process of associative thinking? And what about fits of delirium? Also, it is not clear if your understanding of “the mental process of associative thinking” includes just verbal thinking.

I tried to give myself some wiggle room here by speaking of such variables as modular, but it's true that one could go alot further here. One thing that comes to mind here is that tracking the variations of such changes (of 'dimensions') through time might correspond to the practice of conceptual genealogy, in the sense practised by Nietzsche and Foucault. — StreetlightX

It may look like Foucault’s genealogy is the development of Nietzsche’s one. Yet, he could not avoid the influence of Austin’s
discovery of performativity. Further, the problematization of the Foucault’s encounter of “words” and “things” become a central theme of Deleuze’s reading of Foucault, as well as of his philosophy of language. Accordingly, both two Pitkin’s dimensions are taken as the two form-substance complexes. Pitkin’s “Delicious,” as well as “green,” can be considered as related to the state of mind and the state of things expressions. As per the state of mind, “delicious” would designate a variable of particular uses, having more social-collective, than an individual, cognitive character. As per the state of things, “green” would express the complex of bodily effects and perceptions, also having the collectively shared functions. And, according to Deleuze, the third dimension of “just-ification” is necessitated with the enunciation of any sentence; it is a diagram that acts as an immanent cause, coextensive with the whole social field.
When we say: “It is delicious,” or “Green,” we effectuate the three dimensions simultaneously. The expression has an ultimate performative character. If we say what we should, or ought to, or must (Cavell’s just-ification), our minds and bodies are becoming related and activated by the regimes of social, collective, and individuating presuppositions. We continuously “do things with words,” practicing the illocutionary force of language.
“The transformation applies to bodies but is itself incorporeal, internal to enunciation. In expressing the noncorporeal attribute, and by that token attributing it to the body, one is not representing or referring but intervening in a way; it is a speech act. The warp of the instantaneous transformations is always inserted into the woof of the continuous modifications.”

Yeah, the point I was making (via Pitkin) is different from Cavell's, but different by way of what I understand as an elaboration and extention of what he says. Cavell's general point is that yes, language and world are always elaborated together, and that we bring the world to our words (or vice versa). What I take Pitkin to add is that words and world are themselves plurivocal, and that exactly which bits of the world, and how it is that our words come to bear on it are essential to pay attention to. This is what I take from her idea of 'axes' or dimentions of meaning, which can be comprised of other words, bits of the world, standards of justification, or whatnot. This allows one to bring out, in a way not possible with Cavell's general point, the idea of differing kinds of words (although of course Cavell goes into this sort of thing elsewhere and at length). — StreetlightX

It could be interesting to compare Cavell's project with Pitkin’s one in more details.
(Though, it is possible that my understanding of your account of Pitkin's approach is quite distorted). It looks like Pitkin wants to stress out
that different words can be classified according to their proximity and direction towards the poles of "meaning" and "thing." (Both terms are ambiguous; therefore, Cavell and Pitkin probably apply them differently). Pitkin's
"meaning" could be apprehended as an intellectual, cognitive operation
of thinking or an act of perception; whereas "thing" would designate an independently existing object ("the fact of the world"). Your example of the word "green" could affirm the correctness of this account: "the meaning of green is tied directly to what is green." In short, some words directly point to activity of mind, and there are words, firmly tied with "things." The relation between the two categories is maintained by the third dimension of just-ification, relating "the meanings of the words with the facts of the world." One could easily find all the three dimensions at the center of Cavell's project: "We need to remind ourselves of what we should say when. When the philosopher asks, "What should we say here?" "What would be the normal thing to say here?" or perhaps, "What is the most natural thing we could say here?" …the point of the question is this: answering it is sometimes the only way to tell others and tell for ourselves what the situation is." For Cavell, the meaning is our state of mind,
when we face a particular context (and not a single "thing"). And, "should" functions as the Pitkin's third dimension of justification, it is an ethical-political imperative of what must be said. The essential linguistic element of analysis is not a single word, but a sentence, articulating the encounter between the "dictionary" and the "world." Pitkin could effectively articulate the existence of the three dimensions. Yet, the task of classifying and categorizing single words could be exhausting, unproductive, and static. At the same time, Cavell's philosophy combines the most general notions with the rigorous analyses of ordinary language

One potentially interesting philosophical puzzle is the distinction and connection between what a thing is called, and what a thing is. This roughly accords to the distinction between language (what a thing is called) and world (what a thing 'is'), but things are slightly more complicated, as we will see. Stanley Cavell raises the question thus: when we encounter something new we've never seen before (a distinctive Inuit boat, say), what do we want to know? What it is, or what it is called? If one says: "oh, that's an umiak", what kind of answer is this? An answer about how we use our words, or an answer about things in the world? — StreetlightX

I think that Cavell’s intention is different. “What seemed like finding the world in a dictionary was really a case of bringing the world to the dictionary. We had the world with us all the time, in that armchair; but we felt the weight of it only when we felt a lack in it. Sometimes we will
need to bring the dictionary to the world. That will happen when
(say) we run across a small boat in Alaska of a sort we have never
seen and wonder-what? What it is, or what it is called? In either
case, the learning is a question of aligning language and the world.”
Our permanent position is to have the world in a dictionary while sitting
in the armchair. So, we need to bring “our dictionary” to the world. Further, the relation between an unknown (single) thing and a meaning of a corresponding hidden word (while traveling) has just preliminary importance. All in all, Cavell’s question is about problematization of what we need to say in a particular ordinary context.

He uses the word "collusion" again, which is not a crime anyone was actually looking to charge him with — NKBJ

Hasn’t Mueller been appointed to investigate the alleged collusion of Trump’s campaign with Russia? And, hasn’t it been the alleged crime?

Passive voice in the first sentence hides the details of who's asking Mueller to testify.
He points out that Mueller "must" stick to the report. The way he says it, implies that it Mueller does so, then Trump will look good. But anyone familiar with the report knows that it implies that Trump has been linked to a large number of crimes. But Trump bets on his followers not looking, and so he presents it in this positive light for himself.
He uses the metaphor of a witch hunt to imply that the accusers are baseless and fanatical. — NKBJ

Personification of the "Great Hoax" as some (presumably) evil creature which is now dead.
He uses (ungrammatical) capitalization to emphasize words.
He uses incomplete sentences for emphasis and simplicity.
He's ungrammatical on purpose, because it makes him look less intellectually elitist and his followers like a leader who's not too much smarter than they are. They want to think that they could be him, that he's one of them.
And finally, he uses ampersands, in part because they help with the character count for tweets, but also because they look official and business. — NKBJ

Thank you for the comprehensive analyses! (I think that Trump himself would be
surprised to learn how sophisticated his communicative devices are :smile: ). I would like to tackle a few key points of your account. The most important one is about the regime of truth, effectuated in this tweet, in Fake news, and, probably, in contemporary politics. When you say that Trump lies, (and, we can substitute a lot of other politicians
for him), your basic premise is that objective truth exists, and there is a solid frame of reference and verification methods. You wrote: “But anyone familiar with the report knows that it implies that Trump has been linked to a large number of crimes.” What do you mean by the expression “familiar with the report”? Do you actually expect Trump audience to read a redacted version of 448 pages report? Of course, they are familiar with the report, but through a partisan interpretation and hermeneutics, taking place in a space absolutely different from an academic field. The vast majority of people who are talking, writing, and judging about the report did not read it. Yet, we are not in the world of the endless exegesis, where the sacred text (The Bible, or Marx’s “Capital”) has been continuously reinterpreted. Trump’s audience got familiar with the report even before it was published! Social media, as well as Mainstream media,
have transformed Mueller’s investigation into an object of a new kind, where “the real and the imaginary, the actual and the virtual, chase after each other, exchange their roles and become indiscernible.” Deleuze differentiates between two regimes of truth: there are an “organic” regime and a “crystalline” regime. In an “organic” regime, descriptions and narrations presuppose a pre-existing external reality.
In contrast, a crystalline description or narration stands for its object, replaces it, both creates and erases it. Deleuze’s ideas are indispensable for understanding and explaining Fake news! While an organic regime requires the clear difference between truth and false, a crystalline regime has been grounded on endless metamorphosis, the power of the false. Does Deleuzian crystalline image (or Trump, or a talk show host) lie? Jeffrey Nealon: “The time image’s direct power of the false does not work through the mediation of the true (by interpreting, deconstructing, or the questioning the objectivist truth – (they are still major tasks of literary criticism)), but gives another account of the real altogether…There is a shift from a focus on understanding something to a concern with manipulating it, from meaning to usage”.

Moreover, Trump's rhetoric and his oratorical style are not prominent at all, they are quite modest and monotonic.
— Number2018

And yet effective. Hence the usage of rhetoric to examine them.

Narratives that are going viral in social media usually have simple and poor structure, so that literary
criticism would not be an appropriate research tool here.
— Number2018

And yet effective. Hence the usage of literary criticism to examine them. — NKBJ

Trump's tweeting hyperactivity by many people has been considered as one of the examples of Fake News. Apparently, they are functional and effective! Nevertheless, I doubt that their textual or literary analyses (though it could be helpful) can fully explain their effectiveness. (The same is right about the subway graffitis)
They are short, simple, and rough literary devices. Therefore, we need to evolve various contextual factors, maintaining and ensuring their success. The analyses of the overall situation on social media could be useful. While in literature, as well as in our lives, there is not a black and white message, but a far more nuanced one, the public Internet sphere is primarily occupied by trivial and oversimplified "meme" that "resonates" with a person's prejudices, so gets sent around the globe in an instant. The people who are posting complete rubbish on social media, day in and day out, as a sort of obsession in life, are not able to make timely efforts to get focused and sit down for hours to analyze and reflect on the problems we face.

From ancient mythology to Hemingway to subway graffiti, literary criticism has not let the simplicity of a text deter it from fulfilling its job. — NKBJ

I do not argue that literary criticism is not a relevant tool for analyzing Fake News. However, I would appreciate it if you could provide an example of its application. :smile:

Literary criticism covers the analysis of rhetoric. That's most of what fake news is. Ergo, literary analysis would be helpful to the analysis of fake news. — NKBJ

Rhetoric! That would relate the phenomenon of Fake news to the art of affecting the audience. Further, it could imply the oversimplification, explaining its emergence by outstanding qualities of a few leaders (Trump, Farage, Johnson…). Of course, one could examine their rhetorical devices; yet, one would find a lot of better contemporary or past speakers or politicians. Moreover, Trump's rhetoric and his oratorical style are not prominent at all, they are quite modest and monotonic.

I'd go so far as to say any close analysis of the wording of fake news is literary criticism, whether intentional or not. — NKBJ

Narratives that are going viral in social media usually have simple and poor structure, so that literary
criticism would not be an appropriate research tool here.
Getting back to literature: There was a quote from Neil Postman, "Amusing Ourselves To Death."
I started thinking that interpretation of some Kafka’s texts ("The giant Mole," and "The Burrow"), could become relevant for understanding Fake news.

Fake news is when the establishment sells big lies to the public. It's NOT when little alt-websites question the establishment. Fake news is the Big Lie that the government sells to the people. That's the point, which in retrospect I should have just said right up front several posts ago. Fake news is how the powers that be keep everyone frightened and compliant. That's what fake news is. — fishfry

In Pakistan, the vast majority of people are completely convinced that the entire story of Bin Laden’s killing was fabricated by the Obama administration. In Russia, almost the whole population believes that 9/11 was wholly prepared and organized by the CIA to create the pretext for invasion into Afghanistan. Numerous Russian political analysts and various experts support this narrative. Yet, most likely, these false narratives have become dominant without governments’ involvement. Apparently, these examples do not comply with your understanding of Fake news.

Both Huxley and Orwell grounded their narrations on simple ideas of utopia and dystopia, and both are in perfect fit with regimes of the truth of grand narratives of modernity. Within our postmodern conditions, grand narratives have been wholly compromised and transformed.
— Number2018

That does not answer my question. In fact, it kind of suggests literary criticism would be pretty helpful, if you know anything at all about literary criticism. — NKBJ

Well, say that you are right, and I don't know. But what is your vision? How would you apply
literary criticism for analyzing Fake news?

I've been depressed to notice that many friends and people I respect, are now convinced that 'climate change is not established by the science', and that 'there's nothing Australia can do to combat climate change' - the kinds of fake news memes that merchants of doubt have been disseminating since Al Gore came out with Inconvenient Truth. — Wayfarer

So, how are you going to convince your friends to change their minds? What is the
non-partisan, common ground for dialog?

the role of Fox News in manipulating both the electorate, and Donald J. Trump, is one of the (many) current scandals of the administration and prime examples of "pushing an agenda". Fox News routinely peddles misinformation, parrots Trump's untruths, and feeds inflammatory content to the Watcher in Chief, with whom it enjoys a symbiotic relationship. There have been numerous articles in the so-called 'liberal media' about this fact. So they're really trying, and succeeding, to shape the agenda; as do many of the Chinese state media, and sections of the Russian media, and many other players, large and small, in this hyper-connected age. — Wayfarer

There is a deep abyss between CNN viewers and Fox ones. Both sides are sure that they possess the truth and blame the opponents' media for imposing agenda, fabrication, propaganda, and manipulation. And this state of affairs also contributes to the explosion of Fake news.

There is a distinction between "fake news" and false information. The intent of fake news is to deceive. Without that intent it is simple false information. Although it may not be the intent of someone who repeats fake news to deceive, the information was still manufactured with the intent to deceive. When Trump accuses news sources of being fake news he deliberately blurs the distinction. There is always the implication that the story is manufactured with the intent to deceive, to lie, but this implication hides behind the more benign accusation that the information is simply false. — Fooloso4

I do not think that the phenomenon of “Fake news” could be explained by someone’s
intentional fabrication and/or manipulation.
Michael Sawer writes:
"Regimes of post-truth seem to depend upon establishing an archive
(that is accessible to and understandable by the public) of self-referential
data points that are not verifiable through other methods of establishing
objective facts... Social media becomes an apparatus that implodes the concept of “truth”
and allows the creation of regimes of discourse (political conversation as
just one instantiation of this phenomenon) that are potentially purposefully
at a distance from what is traditionally framed as “facts” in that they
were dependent upon being part of a produced and hierarchical media
ecosystem...
The era of post-truth is related to the evolution of
the media to “social” media…Donald Trump rode
the wave of this transitional space into the presidency.
“Trump Phenomenon” has been uniquely positioned
to take advantage of the seismic shift in the manner in which
individuals receive news and understand the presentation of this material
to represent something like facts."

Magritte said that a painting of a weeping face does not express grief. To believe so, he thought, would be as naive as believing that a cake expresses what the baker was thinking when she created it. — frank

We should not understand his words literally.
Magritte’s entire project was about the deconstruction of the ordinary, conventional perceptions and the building of a new frame of reference, where visible, ostensible, and sayable would function differently.

Differently, Zizek assumes that “Fake news” has been the indispensable result of our
post-modern conditions; implicitly, he involves the emergence of new regimes of truth (“post-facts” and “post-truth”
— Number2018
And this is why I don't believe in Post-Modernism. It's criticized from both left and right. It simply is bullshit. — ssu

Unfortunately, this is the state of affairs; it does not depend on yours or my personal
beliefs. We can call it variously if you don’t like Post-Modernism. Nietzsche called it
"will to power," and Deleuze – "the power of the false."

Besides, false propaganda has existed for a long time, no matter what Trump says. Social media has just given it some credibility, because people want to hear what they want to hear. — ssu

You are right. Yet, Zizek also points out that there are positive aspects of "fake news":
spontaneity, uncontrollability, and freedom of expression.

unlike genuine fake news (!), the NYT at least publishes corrections, listens to criticism, and tries to correct the record. — Wayfarer

It could be interesting to compare the “two kinds of news”: “genuine fake news,” and that of mainstream media. From the one side, mainstream media has institutional, legal, and professional restrains, comparing to independent and almost unregulated social media. From another side, we can doubt that mainstream media report things because they’re true, they talk about them because of their importance, and they write articles because “the public need to know.” The MSM primarily report things that serve an agenda, true or false, real or imaginary. The narrative matters much more than the facts. Further, the (in)compatibility and interchangeability of narratives, their short life and high speed of their circulation create a ground for what we call “genuine fake news.”

fake news memes that merchants of doubt have been disseminating since Al Gore came out with Inconvenient Truth. — Wayfarer

Al Gore made a remarkable presentation; unfortunately, I lost its tracks. Yet, its merits,
style, and form, so different from academic research, could be taken up by opposite narratives.

As it turned out in the fullness of time, those articles were lies. To be absolutely clear, they were not well-intended mistakes. They were deliberate fabrications for the purpose of lying the country into war. — fishfry

The problem with your example that you make the judgment "in the fullness of time".
Yet, maybe at the time of publication, those articles relied on plausible information.

Now, would you or would you not define that as Fake News? — fishfry

To answer your question, we need a well formulated and operative definition of fake news. The following definitions are insufficient:

"false news stories, often of a sensational nature, created to be widely shared or distributed for the purpose of generating revenue, oor promoting or discrediting a public figure, political movement, company, etc."
"false stories that appear to be news, spread on the internet or using other media, usually created to influence political views or as a joke"
"Fake news, also known as junk news or pseudo-news, is a type of yellow journalism or propaganda that consists of deliberate disinformation or hoaxes spread via traditional news media (print and broadcast) or online social media. ... The relevance of fake news has increased in post-truth politics."

It doesn't take a news junkie to recognise that "MOON WILL CRASH INTO EARTH NEXT WEEK" is fake news. — Bitter Crank

What was October 30, 1938 Orson Welles’s radio broadcast about? “The War of the Worlds”
included “news alerts” that led the listener to believe that the show was
presenting actual events. This was not because of the content (which was
ridiculous) but authoritative because of the format of the presentation.

I do not think literature or literary criticism could be relevant to understand fake news.
— Number2018

Because....? — NKBJ

Both Huxley and Orwell grounded their narrations on simple ideas of utopia and dystopia, and both are in perfect fit with regimes of the truth of grand narratives of modernity. Within our postmodern conditions, grand narratives have been wholly compromised and transformed.

And I am NOT suggesting it is simply "opinion", but that it is typically just "opinion". — ZhouBoTong

Any private opinion, after all, appears to be a typical, common opinion. Further, taken up by mass media or social media, it acquires some attributes of truthful knowledge.

Fake news has both components of the agreement as well as disagreement, and it does not express merely someone’s private opinion.

Both books are great, but I do not think literature or literary criticism could be relevant to understand fake news.

The alienation of people from their government representatives mirrors the alienation of the political class from international vectors of power. One way to address this issue is to replace non-compliance with structurally conditioned indifference; the 'non-linear' part of Russian propagandist Surkov's non-linear warfare:

In his enforcement of Putin’s will — or his own interpretation of it — Surkov carefully constructed and presided over a system in which Russians could play-act an intricate imitation of democracy. Every persuasion on the political spectrum was given a Kremlin-backed voice within the system as Surkov ensured that the Kremlin organized and funded a wide range of political groups and movements, from liberal to Communist to conservative, sowing confusion and cynicism in the public while at the same time co-opting any genuine opposition. The messengers differed, but the message was the same — the Kremlin was always in control. Under Surkov’s simulation of politics, dissent wasn’t crushed: it was managed.

The key part of this management strategy is the creation of supported avenues for dissent which stymie the formation of effective popular movements. These are gatekeepers for political action, moving the goalposts or hiding them.

It has the perhaps intentional side effect of alienating honest citizens from politics by denying the efficacy or applicability of their votes and petitions.

The media management of outrage interacts with our modern day equation of politics=political discourse to play a role here, the contours of acceptable opinion are rarely perturbed, and the well known alliance between powerful corporations and media outlets (cough Murdoch and Koch cough) project the voice of the ruling class from the institutions which help shape the terms of debate in which popular opinion is formed. Politics on social media is typically sound and fury organising nothing except the convenience of our ruling class.

An emerging role for 'influencers' is taking place, acting as pseudo-servants of the ruling classes by embodying acceptable opinions which are near the contours of acceptable opinion. The communities which support influencers also necessarily become associated with a consumer identity through the algorithms which shape the medium they are in: these algorithms also watch their every move, and our governments have almost unrestricted access. Here we can see the role of ideological echo-chambers, discretising identity into a panopticon of conflicting units that in reality have far more shared political interest than their antipodal role in discourse suggests.

This promotes a second level of apathy and indifference, there are people who can 'see through' this shit, which includes many liberal commentators, but this is still within the narrows of acceptable opinion; it is fashionable to bemoan the degradation of discourse, and this too is organised over influencer communities. — fdrake

Thank you for the interesting analysis of some totalitarian aspects of our societies. I just want to add a few points. I think that it will be beneficial to reconsider the concept of alienation that you applied. To better explain it, I like to bring one of the Zizek' assertions in the debate with Peterson. He said (based on his own personal experience - he was born and grew up in totalitarian Eastern Europe) that people could be happy while living in a totalitarian society. Further, to strengthen his argument, Zizek a few times pointed out at China. And, his great concern was that a kind of totalitarianism can become our own future. So, Zizek assumes the essential compatibility of "happiness" with various totalitarian regimes: being self-identified with an external transcendental unity, people experience not alienation, but happiness. The concept of alienation (as opposing to totality) implies a set of classical liberal political premises of the existence of the rational subject, the agent of rights, choices, and interests. However, there is no rational subject outside of the media megamachine, the role of which is not just that "of ideological echo-chambers, discretizing
identity into a panopticon of conflicting units." And, it is much more politically effective, than just "Politics on social media is typically sound and fury organizing nothing except the convenience of our ruling class." Each mass media platform produces, organizes, and reproduces not just the frame of essential public opinions and discourses, but also the chain of social and cultural codes, inseparable from corresponding values, positions, perspectives, views, etc.
Even when mass media looks like reporting the essential local news, first of all, they reproduce their own self-referential communicative machinic reality. "Real" facts and narratives in themselves have nothing substantial (= "identical") about them, but merely have to be identified in the context of being reviewed, selected, and retained for purposes of reference, of recursive use, and only for that purpose. Consequently, the media localizes and structures socio-psychological patterns, created by its mass action that just later may appear as "real" socially independent autonomic groups. It is most likely that Surkov's simulation of politics in Russia could be possible only through an intensive utilization of mass media processes and developments. Yet, in our societies, without an apparent external organizer, are they able to generate autonomously their totalitarian effects? I do not deny the well
known effects of alienation from politics, I just think that there are much more ways of political engagement than it is usually considered.

But what kind of significance does saying 'it is false that houses turn into flowers' have? How, even in principle, does one go about rendering any sense of significance to this? Think again of the child who affirms the truth of this statement ("mumma! houses turn into flowers!): one's immediate (adult?) response is something like: 'this child doesn't know what truth is'; or, 'this child doesn't quite understand how houses, or flowers, or change works', or "how adorable". This child doesn't understand concepts and how they relate to other concepts - at least, not like we do. Her language is in error (according to our standards). That's the immediate adult response, not: 'No darling, houses do not turn into flowers' (at least, it's not the response parent who isn't tired and just wants to get through lunchtime with bub; or, the adult could say this, but she's being somewhat pedagogically irresponsible). — StreetlightX

distinctions with significance require asymmetry of response: if anything is possible, then anything follows, and one cannot say anything significant about anything at all.

Constraints need to be placed on our grammar such that one responds this way to a truth and this way to a falsehood: this asymmetry is the condition for language to function at all. But no such asymmetry exists in the case of 'it is false that houses turn into flowers'. — StreetlightX

Indeed, Cavell’s claim can be interpreted as an assertion of a fundamental asymmetry, grounding the condition for language to function at all. When Cavell writes that “I am asserting, rather, that we do not yet know what verification for or against it would be … both [the denial and assertion] rest on the same concept of what knowledge is, or must be … Both, in a word, use absolutely conclusive verification out of its ordinary context,” he means that he refutes all possible empirical processes of the verification of the given proposition “houses turn/do not turn into flowers.” Houses, flowers, the turn may have meaning from our ordinary context. Further, instead of real houses and flowers, we can consider our notions of these objects, but it is still possible to organize a process of verification. The utterance “houses turn into flowers” can have
different functions – it could be a proposition about real, imaginary, or symbolic objects. Or, it could be a grammatically correct/incorrect phrase - which is still an object for a kind of verification or an automatic rejection/acceptance within
the ordinary context. Another possibility is to assume that the utterance is merely a statement that just later can bear an assigned meaning and become a meaningful sentence or a true/false
proposition. Therefore, it has not yet confronted by a correlate or the absence of a correlate, as a proposition has (or has not) a referent. When the child says ("mumma! houses turn into flowers!), maybe she affirms the truth of this statement, but most likely she just exercises a fundamental ability of enouncing significant sentences; if it were just a random or mechanical combination of sounds, there would not be any significant adult response. A faculty to produce and differentiate significant and non-significant expressions can operate as “absolutely conclusive verification out of its ordinary context.”

Where does the association between the request and the equivalence relation take place? Does it occur in the use of language? Is it an event? — fdrake

A few additional dimensions ground the association between the request and the equivalence relation. First, there is the intention (desire) to speak, which is an affectively determined vector of the production of subjectivity, of the process of self-affirmation. Next, there is a set of ethico-political values and choices that are manifested through the accomplishment of any speech act. Therefore, the association between the request and the equivalence, as well as words and grammatical forms, provide the necessary logical and technical possibilities for
a potential linguistic performance. Yet, they are not sufficient. The speech act that occurs “here and now” is an event; it is the individuation, singularization, and actualization of the potentiality of language, whereas the pre-personal affective forces and post-personal ethico-political social forces are crucial determinants.

In spite of the apparent divergence of their accounts of technology, Heidegger and Simondon reveal the affinity of their understandings of an event, whereas Simondon’s notion of Transindividual is quite close to Heidegger’s Being. Heidegger: "the manner in which the matter of thinking-Being-comports itself, remains a unique state of affairs. The inauthentic modes of the ready-to-hand, the present-to-hand, average everydayness, authentic Being, Ereignis all mark different factical experiences. Yet what is common to all possible modes of Being is certain radical mobility”.
Muriel Combes writes in her book about Simondon: "the domain of psychological individuality has no proper space; it exists
as something superimposed upon the physical and biological domains."
(IPC, 152; IL, 278). Psychological individuality is constituted as a relation
to the physical world and biological world, as a "relation to the world and to
self," because it is turned as a whole toward the collective: we must thus
understand that a separate "psychological world" does not exist, but only,
and always already, a "transindividual universe" (IPC, 153; IL, 279). As such,
psychological individuality appears to be essentially transitional in nature,
covering an ensemble of specific processes organizing the passage from the
level due to physical and biological individuation, populated with physical
and living individuals, to the level of the collective resulting”.
Further, formally, it is possible to show that the Simondon’s individualizing operation grounds the genesis of being similarly as the Heideggerian radical mobility does. (“Within and beyond states, forms and structures, lies a universe of barely self-exceeding accents, modulations, aspects, variations, ways of working”). Yet, there are fundamental differences in the Simondon vs. Heidegger ways of working, of operating.

↪Number2018 What do you make of that quote? — schopenhauer1

The gent scholar types want to think that understanding principles of science, and applications in technology provide some inherent meaning. Thus, by edifying themselves in the immersions in these topics, they feel they are participating in something grander or important. The fact that the world works in such a way as applying mathematically-derived, precise scientific principles to materials, processes, functionalities, etc. makes it such that their work is really "doing something", perhaps above and more so than those who are not engaged in these activities. — schopenhauer1

I mean that for Heidegger scientists themselves in principle cannot give a full and correct account on what are they doing. Farther, if one embraces this assertion, one can conclude that scholars undoubtedly are “doing something”; nevertheless, it is unknown in what they are taking part.
Of course, any scholar can have a kind of a feeling and tell stories about their personal experience; yet, all these accounts will always remain ungrounded and opened to a constant process of different interpretations.