Engaging the Post-Truth Crisis in Education Affectively: Elements for a Psychoanalytically Informed Pedagogy

At the end of 2016, the Oxford English Dictionary announced 'post-truth' as word of the year, and since then, the concept has been invoked around the world to describe the growing anxieties surrounding the current crisis in truth, wherein emotion appears to have replaced fact in the shaping of public opinion. Society is witnessing what seems to be an unprecedented increase in the spread of fake news, alternative facts, and "affective feedback loops" that have hate on the rise, increasing left/right divides. There has been groundbreaking research across disciplinary divides that clearly identifies the targeting of emotions via personalized social media messaging as the new frontier of propaganda. However, despite the fact that the relationship between digital propaganda and manipulated emotion has come to public awareness, not enough attention is being drawn to the need for critical media literacy projects in education that include understandings of how emotions are being targeted and manipulated. Because psychoanalysis sees emotional life as the most significant resource for learning to think, and in learning to think differently, in this article, Jennifer Logue explores what psychoanalytic theory can bring to the "truthiness" table. She suggests that psychoanalytic insight can be extremely helpful in the creation of new pedagogies that enables people to better navigate the current climate of hate and fear, and the epidemic of "affective information warfare" people currently find themselves in.