The Truth Society: Science, Disinformation, and Politics in Berlusconi's Italy

by Noelle Molé Liston

Overview

Noelle Molé Liston's The Truth Society seeks to understand how a period of Italian political spectacle, which regularly blurred fact and fiction, has shaped how people understand truth, mass-mediated information, scientific knowledge, and forms of governance. Liston scrutinizes Italy's late twentieth-century political culture, particularly the impact of the former prime minister and media mogul Silvio Berlusconi. By doing so, she examines how this truth-bending political era made science, logic, and rationality into ideas that needed saving.

With the prevalence of fake news and our seeming lack of shared reality in the "post-truth" world, many people struggle to figure out where this new normal came from. Liston argues that seemingly disparate events and practices that have unfolded in Italy are historical reactions to mediatized political forms and particular, cultivated ways of knowing. Politics, then, is always sutured to how knowledge is structured, circulated, and processed. The Truth Society offers Italy as a case study for understanding the remaking of politics in an era of disinformation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501750786
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	11/15/2020
Series:	Expertise: Cultures and Technologies of Knowledge
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.94(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Noelle Molé Liston is a Senior Lecturer at New York University. She is the author of Labor Disorders in Neoliberal Italy. Follow her on X @MoleListon.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Manifest Disguise and Mediatized Politics
2. The Soldiers of Rationality
3. The Rise of Algorithm Populism
4. The Trial against Disinformation
5. Scientific Anesthetization in the Anthropocene
Conclusion: Mirrored Window World

What People are Saying About This

Emanuela Guano

By weaving together only seemingly disparate concepts and ethnographic scenarios, Molé's The Truth Society provides a brilliant exploration of how contemporary Italian publics negotiate truth in political discourse, science, and the media.

Jane Cowan

We live in age when concerns about disinformation, fake news, and media bubbles continue to reverberate across the globe. In The Truth Society, Noelle Mole Liston develops a timely and highly original anthropological analysis of the politics of post-truth. Across its vibrant chapters, the book takes Italian anxieties around truth—the lack of truth, the emptiness of truth, the threats against truth—and treats them as an ethnographic object. Combining historical and ethnographic analysis, the book takes readers through the rise and fall of Berlusconi and his brand of political aesthetics. Creative both in its subject matter and its approach, and with an astounding wealth of empirical detail, the book illuminates the Italian case but also the larger politics of truth that has come to afflict so many, ostensible democracies in the present, from the US to Brazil to the UK to India.

Jason Pine

The Truth Society eloquently synthesizes complex literatures on climate change and the climate of truth-making to generate the perfect milieu for understanding the Aquila trial (figured as an act of war against science), pro-science activism, and contemporary Italian populist politics.

Editorial Reviews

This notion of truth lies at the heart of Noelle Molé Liston's inquiry into recent developments in Italian politics and society.

Survival: Global politics and strategy

This notion of truth lies at the heart of Noelle Molé Liston's inquiry into recent developments in Italian politics and society.

-- "Survival: Global politics and strategy"

From the Publisher