I’m pretty sure it’s all Plato’s fault. It is perhaps he, more than any other thinker, who is responsible for that singular, defining element of Western thought: That a statement stands as truth when it resists all contradiction. Through the snaking dialectics of his Socratic dialogues, we learned that the ideal of truth was to use logical sequence to arrive at impossible-to-oppose assertions.
It has proven a resilient idea, and why shouldn’t it? If a wall gives off a certain wavelength of light that we call “red,” it cannot be true that it is green. If all the evidence we have suggests smoking causes cancer, it is false to say it does not. This is, according to some anyway, the core of traditional Judeo-Christian thinking: One notion, one truth.
Empirically verifiable facts are one thing, but I’m starting to wonder if this notion that only one statement about a thing can be true isn’t in fact hampering discussion about the fuzzier, less precise dimensions of cultural discourse. As opinions and ideas careen around the web, maybe this still-new medium is helping to lay bare that we need another way of speaking about this old philosophical notion of “an exclusive truth.”
It’s the predominance of the thinkpiece—and its cousins the op-ed, the strident link-bait post and the rant, and the swirl of cultural discourse they collectively form—that has me thinking about this. It’s a phenomenon that exists regardless of medium, but is often sped-up and concentrated online, turning said discourse into a seething matrix of opinion, crisscrossed with contradiction and anger.
You have to wonder what the point of all of it is. When just a little while ago a certain slice of North American culture exploded in reaction to Miley Cyrus’ performance at the VMA’s, the flood of thinkpieces threatened to wash us all away. Why would anyone sit down to write another “take”?
It seems that the answer for both the narcissistic and the gifted would be the same: To now, finally, cast off the pretenders to the truth and offer the right interpretation. Inevitably, this has to be the undercurrent to the opinion piece. Why offer another perspective unless one believes the offering to be of value—and true?
Taken at a kind of bird’s-eye-view, however, the contribution of all of these voices forms not so much a pluralist truth as a truth that is plural, one that is only ever a virtual aggregate of all of the opinions available. It’s as if the mess of viewpoints on cultural topics is a heaving web-like ocean of interlinked ideas, and each novel, smart entrance into that glut of views shifts it, pulling it one direction, as each forceful rejoinder tugs it in another. It works for anything that can’t be pinned down—Miley, the ethics and aesthetics of Breaking Bad, rape jokes, food trends. The networks of reaction form “networked truths,” a term referring to the competing mass of worldviews as itself an object worthy of study.
There’s no reason to think this virtual suspension of multiple truths is a new phenomenon, though. Rather, it’s that we’re presented with a medium that helps us recognize this “truth about truths” more clearly and easily.
If that’s the case, the question to then ask is whether a potential shift in our experience of truth demands a better kind of thinkpiece. And if it was Miley Cyrus that started my wondering about the singular truth of the opinion piece, then it was a reaction to that debacle that crystallized my feeling that, yes, we do.
Ayesha Siddiqi, writing in The New Inquiry, chose a different path when addressing Miley. Rather than trying to take a clear side in which the performance was racist, the reaction was sexist, or that it meant nothing at all, Siddiqi instead argued about the impossible contradictions that informed both the performance and reaction: That, all at the same time, Cyrus’ sexuality was both subject to misogyny and legitimate critique, and that the commodification of markers of black cultural practice was both racially problematic and understandable for a white girl looking to shake her Disney image. There was no neatly singular argument, only a framing of the impossibility of arriving at one.
It seemed, to my mind, to perfectly capture how to “capture truth,” in that it didn’t exactly try to—at least in the singular sense. Instead, a networked version of truth places contesting worldviews in opposition to each other and, far from simply leaving them in pluralist limbo, then provides a meta-reading of what is “right” and “wrong” about the relationships of those ideas. In the case of Siddiqi’s reading of Cyrus, it was the impossibility of escaping the reduction of both female and black bodies to objects passed around like currency, a situation that will always produce moments that are experienced one way by some, and quite differently by others—or, even more difficultly, contradictorily experienced by the same person.
It is not an easy way to think of the world. But then, these are not easy times; they never have been. Faced, however, with a medium that lays bare the Platonic handcuffs we place on ourselves to always say “this one take is true,” perhaps it is time to cast them off and embrace the shifting, unstable, multiple meta-truths that networks can help us see.
