I started writing this text more than 20 days ago, without being able to finish it. In the time that has passed so far, I continue to think about it, trying to minimally understand the issues it brings. Maybe I failed. Thus, below, I do not propose to bring clear or closed answers. What I write below may bring more questions than answers. I believe that perhaps they are clues, notes of a way to continue thinking about this very complex issue that has intrigued me for a long time.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine, the news and networks have been filled with images such as armed and unarmed Ukrainian civilians trying to stop tanks, residential buildings being bombed, Russian soldiers displaying their weapons, Ukrainians and immigrants crossing the border into Poland, anti-war demonstrations in Moscow, Berlin, New York, etc. Considering that this is the recent war with the greatest global impact, due to the weight and influence of those involved, perhaps never has a war been so "watched" in the whole world. We are following the war in what we call "real time". In this way, this war no longer happens only on the battlefield and extends to social networks, to the internet as a whole.
The Ukrainian president, for example, has made constant use of social media The information published by him on his Twitter has been widely shared and has been a source of news for many media outlets. He clearly takes advantage of this by making several videos about what is happening in Ukraine. He approaches not only his people but also those who watch remotely. It is even said that from the internet, people have been "enlisted" to virtually defend Ukraine.
On the other hand, even if the Russian president does not make use of the networks in the same way as Zelensky - who himself addresses listeners and viewers - there is a heavy propaganda machine at work, defending another angle of history. The Russian government has increasingly sought to prevent news and images from reaching the country through the internet, blocking or banning social networks, for example. From Russian state TV, the government strictly controls what is said about the situation in Ukraine, stating, for example, that it is a "special military operation" and not a war. However, in times of the internet, it is almost impossible to fully control access to information. Thus, there are many Russian citizens who have spoken out against such an "operation" and, as a result, thousands of them have already been detained in several cities of the country.
Thereby It is a military war, but also what today has been called a "war of narratives" . We know that both sides of the war make use of narratives that serve their respective interests. As soon as Russia invaded Ukraine, one of the warnings made on the networks was precisely to be careful to check sources and facts before spreading information that, especially in a war, can have a strong impact and devastating consequences.
Many curious stories have come to light in this scenario. The correspondent Sergio Utsch , for example, tells the story of a mother and daughter from Odessa, Ukraine, who found shelter at the home of a friend of their daughter's in Chisinau, Moldova. In this house, when they showed the photos of the war, they were asked to delete these photos, because, according to the friend's family, they are not true images, they are fake news .
There is also Oleksandra's account , a 25-year-old woman living in Ukraine whose mother lives in Moscow. Even seeing videos of the city where her daughter lives being bombed, her mother does not believe that she is in danger. According to Oleksandra, she only repeats what she sees on Russian state TV, saying that the Russians will liberate Ukraine and that their target is only military bases.
These are just a few samples of this phenomenon that we have been following in recent years and give the dimension of its complexity. What can you think about them?
Particularly, when I hear the word "narrative" - said and written repeatedly at this moment - I immediately think about how dear it is to psychoanalysis. One of the greatest contributions made by Freud was that he realized, throughout his practice, that it was precisely the patient's narrative about his illness that held the key to his cure. In a letter to Fliess, from 1897, Freud makes the famous statement "I no longer believe in my neurotic", showing that:
(...) in the unconscious, there are no indications of reality, so that it is not possible to distinguish between truth and fiction that is cathected [invested] with affection (p. 310, Standard Edition).
In this way, the concept of truth gains another perspective for psychoanalysis, being linked to a fiction, in the field of the unconscious. In psychoanalysis, we take into account especially the psychic reality and not the material one. It is the first one that really interests us, because it will allow us to access something true about the subject. (As I have already said here, I find this topic extremely fascinating, so I intend to deal with it in other texts to give it due attention).
Fake news, on the other hand, is most often fabricated with clear motivations and intentions, in order to fabricate a specific reality that responds to the interests of those who create it. Maybe we could say that they are created on purpose, deliberately falsified, in bad faith. But this seems to me to be only one layer of the phenomenon.
These days I saw a cartoon in which one person warns another that certain news is false, to which the other person replies "It doesn't matter, it's convenient for me", clinging concretely to the words "fake news". Obviously, you can share fake news out of ignorance, because it goes against what we believe, because it confirms what we think. And here, we would have the psychic reality of each one at stake. But what to think of the fact that a mother who receives videos of bombings of the city where her daughter is and still does not believe it, denies reality?
It is impossible not to remember Freud's text "The Negation", a text from 1925 that was quite short and really fundamental in Freud's work. In it, Freud brings a famous example of the patient who reports a dream and then says something like "I don't know who the person in the dream is, but it's not my mother". The psychoanalyst states that the "no" placed in front is a mark of repression, it is the denial that allows the repressed, "censored" content of an idea or image to come to consciousness.
What is at stake is the intellectual function of judgment, which must confirm or deny contents, making two decisions in this regard: whether something is good or bad, useful or harmful, and whether or not it should be accepted by the Self; and whether that which is represented in the ego can be found again in reality. What is good must be inside and "what is bad and what is outsider, who is outside, are initially identical (p. 278, edition Cia das Letras).
The book Ethics and post-truth , a collection of texts by different authors, can also help us shed light on this phenomenon. In his participation, with the chapter entitled "It is necessary to stop arguing", Vladimir Safatle shows, based on a quote from the Brazilian philosopher Bento Prado, that the time we live in is in fact more complex, not allowing us to evaluate things only in true or false; that "The field of persuasion is that of war rather than that of communicational understanding",
The basis of a language game is not constituted by propositions susceptible to truth and falsity, but corresponds only to something like a choice without any rational foundation (p. 91, Kindle edition).
What would the war of narratives be about if not an attempt at persuasion? On the one hand, trying to convince the other that he is right? Safatle, complementing what Bento Prado says, states that what bases the decision on one or another argument, our assent to one or another idea, is something in the field of affection, that is, it is a decision "affected by a pathos ".
What persuades us is not exactly the truth of a proposition, but the correctness of a form of life that takes shape when I act on certain criteria and admit the value of certain modes of conduct and judgment. In this sense, the criterion of what persuades me is linked to an evaluative judgment about forms of life that have normative weight (p. 92, Kindle edition) .
In the same sense, Dunker, when talking about post-truth, says that the main characteristic of this "(...) it requires a refusal of the other or at least a culture of indifference that, when threatened, reacts with hatred or violence. It is increasingly difficult to listen to the other, to assume their perspective, to reflect, to reposition oneself and to converge differences (p. 17, Kindle edition)". Like Safatle, he gives us indications of an impossibility of making something of the difference, which ultimately leads to violence and destruction.
War of narratives, fake news, post-truth, denialism... I suspect that the fact that we are still so close to these phenomena makes it difficult to explain or name them more clearly. They disrupt ideas, opinions and even question concepts coined so many years ago. Each time brings its peculiarities, its transformations (although sometimes - as in the war itself - we also see ourselves as similar to what we were 80 years ago). It seems to me that perhaps more distance is needed to, perhaps, understand these phenomena that are so current and still so lacking in elucidation. Probably only a posteriori , only later, some events can gain more substance in their significance. And without a doubt, other areas of knowledge can bring precious contributions in this regard.
Here are some questions and some possible ways to reflect on the subject. Although there is not so much clarity, I think it is essential to doubt the image and the words that reach us. This is true for the specific context of the war, as well as for our national political context. It is necessary to be careful and responsible for what we find both inside and outside of us.
Note: It is worth watching Christian Dunker's video, available on his YouTube channel, in which he deals with denialism. In it, the psychoanalyst lists different types of deniers, evidencing particularities of denial for psychoanalysis.
