Neoliberal Epistemology and the Truth in Fake News (Self-Writing/Self-Enterprise/Self-Control)

Bibliographic Data

ID5160011
AuthorsRicky D’andrea Crano (Tufts University), Ricky Crano (corresponding author)
Year2018
Volume23
Issue5
Pages11-31
Publication date2018-09-03
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAngelaki (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0969-725X • E-ISSN: 1469-2899
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/0969725x.2018.1513195
OpenAlexW2890791919
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited13

Taking cues from Michel Foucault’s late work on ancient cultures of self-care, this article argues that the success of neoliberalism is bound up with an epistemological critique of modernity forged by the movement’s founding theorists. This critique takes aim at three distinct intellectual currents – the socialist, the rationalist, and the pastoral – and thus marks a tripartite break from modern techniques of power and subjectivation. I contend that a Hellenistic model of self-cultivation – exemplified especially in Epicurean, Cynic, and Stoic discourses and scrutinized meticulously by Foucault in his late lectures – becomes reactivated in late twentieth-century American economic and social thought. The second half of the article considers modes of digital writing as “technologies of the self.” Taking the case of “fake news” as my central reference point, I argue that common practices of social media “sharing” constitute an emerging practice of curatorial self-writing that makes one an especially favorable target for neoliberal strategies of social control

Aesthetics · Epistemology · Late modernity · Michel foucault · Modernity · Neoliberalism (international relations · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Self · Social science · Sociology · Digital Media and Philosophy · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Media, Religion, Digital Communication · Law · Philosophy

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