Memetic Politics: War and Peace “After Truth” | Arvydas Grisinas
This talk encapsulates an ongoing book project about the changing ways we engage in politics when public truths cease to be factual, wars are fought digitally, and knowledge is governed by AI. The 21st century was expected by many to be a time of radical, post-historical enlightenment, marked by an increasing velocity of scientific and technological innovation, interconnection, and knowledge sharing. It is, however, also a time of consecutive crises, discursive sectarianism and an anachronistic, ahistorical, yet hyper-mediated Russia’s war in Ukraine, fought with no rational purpose, meaningful reason, or clear format.
It is therefore obvious that we find ourselves at a time of a shifting regime of truth. On one hand, Western political and epistemological hegemony is seceding to non-Western political cultures. On the other hand, digital culture empowers dis-enlightened forms of knowledge-making and communication, driven by a different logic than the one we are used to. The result of this “dimming” of the Enlightenment is an emergence of memetic politics: a non-linear, associative, and performative form of political culture, where affect and representation rather than empirical evidence and factual presence dictate the dynamics of political processes, knowledge, and truth-making.
Lunch at 12:30pm ET, talk at 1:00pm ET
Location: Luce Hall, Rm 202, 2nd fl, 34 Hillhouse Ave
Zoom: Register for the webinar link- https://bit.ly/ERSLunch-Feb1624
Part of the European & Russian Studies Community Lunch Seminar Series
Dr. Arvydas Grišinas is Fulbright Visiting Fellow at Yale University and Researcher at Kaunas University of Technology. He also held visiting scholar positions at Yale University, Uppsala University (Sweden) and Institute for Human Sciences (Austria). His work centers on post-Soviet political identity formation in Central and Eastern Europe. He received his Ph.D. in Politics and Government from the University of Kent (Great Britain) in 2015, having finished his undergraduate education in History and Anthropology at Vilnius University (Lithuania).
Dr. Grišinas is the author of a book titled Politics with a Human Face: Identity and Experience in Post-Soviet Europe (Routledge, 2018) that examines how identity formation, symbolism, historical narratives, political images, and other human factors shape politics in Lithuania, Russia, Ukraine, and the rest of the post-Soviet European region.
He is currently working on a second book, exploring the challenges that the current technological, political and intellectual developments present to the enlightened processes of truth and meaning-making in politics, war and culture. The book explores topics of symbolism, performative politics and practices of truth as the ground for the emerging new Intuitive Politics, as it unfolds in both Eastern Europe and the West.