Perform, repeat, react: performance criticism and contemporary political rationalities

Abstract

Michael Gove, one of the main faces of the Vote Leave campaign, recently said that "people in this country have had enough of pundits". According to journalist Henry Mance, in an article for the Financial Times, Gove's inability to demonstrate, economically, his argument that the UK was sending £350 million to the EU every week was proof that the politics of "post-truth" had already penetrated the UK. The term 'post-truth politics' is grounded in a contemporary era in which fraud is a transparent and powerful currency of exchange, both fiscally and politically; it exposes the precarity of meaning, in which the structures that legitimise and sometimes legislate facts and their circulation have become fluid. Post-truth" policies also show a paradox: on the one hand, the growing need to resort to experts, to intellectual supports, to critical and political involvement that allow differentiation to occur for and with the public; on the other hand, skepticism towards the singularity and autonomy of these experts, fearing their corruption, tied to forms of subjectivity in which the boundaries between public and private, between fact and fiction, become difficult to discern.