Euripides Altintzoglou
(University of Wolverhampton)
Abstract:
Post-Truth assertions are public acts of persuasion; rhetoric exercises that employ rational processes of dissemination (technology) and volumetric strategies of validated authorship(public endorsement of the ‘source’) in order to corroborate the ethical manipulation of what is right or wrong. This paper will pay particular focus on the allegorical processes that enable the production of these public statements and their operative manipulation of the veracity of fiction as fact: the resolution of familiar images into otherwise abstract aesthetic norms followed by their re-contextualised appropriation into precepts of specific ideological determinacy. Images have been traditionally theorised within binary paradigms: personal/universal, truthful/idealised (fictional), radical/hegemonic. With the rise of social media and their impact on the rate of dissemination of information, along with a populist determination of source credibility, we need to consider how these factors further condition the production of meaning in images that are proposed as ‘truthful’. The resurgent prominence of the theory of the ‘affect’ provides a third pole that not only mediates a balance within the dialectic natureof linguistic and semantic conflictual coexistences but also repositions the production of meaning as an emergent phenomenon. In such triadic networks, the ‘unleashed potentiality of abstraction’ (Massumi, 1995) renders the ‘affect’ as a tabula rasa, where the allegorical methods of confiscation, superimposition, fragmentation, and decentralisation (Owens,1980) are employed for the appropriation of narratives.
Dr Euripides Altintzoglou is a Subject Leader in Photography and a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art & Photography at the FHEA Wolverhampton School of Art, University of Wolverhampton. He is the author of Portraiture and Critical Reflections on Being (Routledge 2018) and co-editor (with Martin Fredriksson) of Revolt and Revolution: The Protester in the 21st Century (Inter-Disciplinary Press 2016). A practicing artist, he exhibited his works in Greece, France and the UK.