Fake News

Hyperreality and the Ideological Aesthetic

I was recently transfixed by a rather odd video on CNN examining the interior of one of Bashar al-Assad’s prisons, liberated after the recent swift and dramatic military victory of Western-backed jihadist rebels in Syria. The video is crisp and stylised in a conspicuous way that immediately puts one on guard. In examining the prison the CNN crew happened upon something stirring under a blanket in a locked cell. After the rebel fighter accompanying them shoots the lock off, as the cameras are conveniently switched off, the crew discovers a prisoner who tearfully learns of the fall of Assad. They then proceed to help the bearded and picturesquely dishevelled man to leave the prison, seemingly overcome with emotion, his shaking hand tightly gripping the kindly arm of reporter Clarissa Ward. As was noted by

Philip Traylen

, although the events presented in this video could conceivably have happened, there is a palpable empirical unreality to the narrative that is impossible to deny. It strikes an odd aesthetic note, one which combines ancien regime levels of oblivious arrogance coupled with a late-Soviet complacency. Like all bad art, it seems not only to lie quite brazenly - but does so inelegantly.

Last year, Ward starred in a video where she and her crew were under fire from a 'massive barrage of rockets' near the Israel-Gaza border.’ They dramatically take cover in a ditch while Ward courageously reports back live to the studio, only to moments later emerge onto a fairly serene-looking street with several bystanders walking calmly past them. The coordinated fact-checking apparatus of the media went into overdrive to reiterate the video’s authenticity, rather bizarrely highlighting what is a clear comedic parody video with overdubbed audio as an example of dangerous ‘disinformation.’ The fact checkers didn’t quite comprehend that it was less a case of questioning the purported ‘facts’, than it was an appraisal of Ward’s B-movie actress countenance and performance. That is to say, it was a critique predicated on aesthetic, rather than empirical, judgement. In this new video, CNN seems to have been unable to resist pushing the envelope of actorly dissimulation into the realm of kitsch, perhaps testing the credulity even of those ordinarily sympathetic and loyal to the media, and thereby giving some account of the motivations of those same people.

Within this video, there is, I feel, an interesting dimension to the current era of ‘Fake News.’ I was not surprised to find that it went almost completely unremarked when I posted it to substack notes asking people to comment on its authenticity. Despite the recent discourse surrounding the value of institutional media vs. emerging independent platforms, many passionate entreaties and civic-minded engagement by its defenders and antagonists - the silence that my post met with was telling. I will note that my proposal was very simple and appealed to both camps. I merely called for those who regard themselves as sensitive, conscientious and honest critics of literature, art and culture to comment on this video’s authenticity, to simply convey whether it presented to them a reality…or rather some performance of ‘reality.’

The video reinforces many of the claims made by Jean Baudrillard in his series of essays La Guerre du Golfe n'a pas eu lieu, originally published by the main organ of the French socialist party Libération in 1991, and in a quaint irony given its current neoliberal ideological partisanship, also in English by The Guardian under the title The Gulf War Did not take place. The essay is often apprehended in a somewhat clichéd and meme-ified manner.

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This popular understanding of Baudrillard's thesis simply holds that when something appears to be happening, nothing is actually happening, or is ever happening. The nuances of the argument are, of course, rather more sophisticated. The realm of the ‘hyperreal’ is indeed reliant on the concept of the Simulacrum, represented by Baudrillard in its fourth iteration as completely bereft from a reality that it once bore some tenuous and sacramental resemblance and connection with (in this case, the iconic and harrowing images of war and conflict throughout media history).

But more significantly, the functioning of any operational regime of hyperreality is heavily dependent on what Baudrillard refers to as the ‘liberating’ claim of subjecthood:

…constituting ourselves as subjects, of liberating ourselves, expressing ourselves at whatever cost, of voting, producing, deciding, speaking, participating, playing the game - a form of blackmail and ultimatum just as serious as the other, even more serious today. To a system whose argument is oppression and repression, the strategic resistance is the liberating claim of subjecthood.

– Jean Baudrillaurd, Simulacra and Simulation (1981)

In this sense, it compliments the theory of the Ideological Aesthetic, which myself and Art historian Christos Asomatos proposed in an article published in the journal Angelaki in 2023. The emergence of mass communications technologies has had the intended effect of creating a realm of apparent hyper-politicisation, which in turn becomes a stultifying state of effective de-politicisation wherein ‘political’ acts come to lack any real-world efficacy.

Phenomena which were once apprehended separately as ‘ideological’ on the one hand, and as ‘aesthetic’ on the other, become interchangeable. This process occurs concomitant to an inability to distinguish between actuality and virtuality, spurred by a febrile, technologically induced, low-level collective psychosis. However, this process has always been dependent upon the recompense provided by the claim of subjecthood - evidenced in our time by the primacy and proliferation of identity politics in the past decade or so. If the appeal of these claims begins to diminish, then the increasingly incompetent and lazy forms of hyperreality like this CNN video should also begin to lose good faith defenders. A cause for cautious optimism thus presents itself: as the artlessness of media propaganda becomes more undeniable, it will in turn gradually become indefensible even for those most invested materially and personally in its success.

The sincere defenders of institutional media in my recent contretemps intentionally mis-read my point about the Washington Post Guild’s pre-election petition, prompted by the Oligarch owner’s refusal to endorse a presidential candidate. My overarching point was that this was a hollow performance of moral rectitude by an unserious PMC union, one that has furthermore been conspicuously silent about far more egregious, but more inconvenient, violations of press freedoms. An undeniable example is the ban on independent reporting from Gaza by Western journalists and news organisations. There is at this point no independent media scrutiny of the courageous soldiers of the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ as they carry out a depraved revenge campaign of massacre on defenceless children and civilians, armed with American tax-payer-funded weapons and intelligence - dropping unguided bombs on densely populated urban areas, against the unequivocal condemnation of international organisations, and contrary to all legal standards that the post-WWII Liberal order once held to be sacrosanct, and that many liberal journalists claim to uphold. In this sense, one isn’t entirely sure whether The Washington Post’s slogan ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’ is a good faith warning or a counterintuitive modus operandi. With these uncomfortable facts in mind, it seems that the lackeys of the institutional media are either deeply cynical and self-serving; or hopelessly naïve and deluded. If we charitably consider it to be the latter, then it’s well to note that we may require a fuller account of their unconscious motivations.

Fake News is perhaps the most interesting phenomenon of our time. Yet we would be very much mistaken in thinking that it only concerns what is real, and what is fake. Rather, it is the difference between what are judged to be acceptable and unacceptable narrative forms for respective ideological groups; a test of their loyalty, their purity etc. Louis Althusser spoke about the process by which a subject becomes a subject of ideology as one of ‘interpellation’, a call or hail which draws the subject into a process of identification. Once interpellated, further affirmations are required by the subject to confirm their place within the symbolic order of a particular ideology. The perfect example of this is the Christian prayer, which ends with the phrase ‘Amen’, which can be translated as ‘So be it’

They must be obedient to God, to their conscience, to the priest, to de Gaulle, to the boss, to the engineer, that thou shalt ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’, etc. Their concrete material behaviour is simply the inscription in life of the admirable words of the prayer: ‘Amen – So Be it’. (Louis Althusser, Ideology and the Ideoloical States Apparatus)

In the secular theology of PMC liberalism, motivated by the bribe of subjecthood, this affirmation takes the form of a denial, a rejection of a certain reality inconvenient to one’s own - thereby confirming one’s place as a loyal subject of the dominant order. Fake news is thus the phenomenon most expressive of the spectacular loss of narrative control the media, as Ideological State Apparatus, has undergone. This loss of control is one of a decline in their ability to put forward compelling and well-conceived narratives above all else. This is where the peculiarities of the ideological aesthetic come to the fore, since any appraisal of competing hyperrealities brings the bourgeois critics’ aesthetic claims under much closer scrutiny. If some claim to favour equality in the public sphere, and some measure of ‘ethical’ inequality in their middlebrow hierarchies of quality, then how do such pseudo-haughty principles relate to their judgement of the aestheticized sphere of neoliberal hyper-reality, which at its most obvious and reductive level, does not cohere with their claims to serve the higher principles of art?

To be a liberal conformist and defender of the status quo is then, by necessity, to also tacitly accept and favour - and sometimes champion - ‘bad art’ when there is a personal incentive to do so. This, more than anything else, underlines the essential hypocrisy at the heart of this worldview. The political will, the material and careerist necessity of those most invested in the PMC ideological state still exists – as has been demonstrated by the reluctance of many to intervene in the challenge I proposed, and in their instinctive defence of demonstrably corrupt institutions. By doing so they will betray how unquestioning their allegiance to the neoliberal narrative is. But perhaps most importantly, their acceptance of such cringe-worthy aesthetics speaks also to their fundamental dishonesty, which renders their already shaky claim to legitimacy within the cultural realm null and void.